Health
Give peace a chance
by Linley Boniface
Meditation is becoming an accepted medical treatment
for everything from depression to heart disease.
The thought of running up the 86 flights of stairs in the Empire State Building is enough to make some of us want to go and have a lie down. It’s even more daunting to imagine attempting this feat while surrounded by hundreds of competitors, all jostling to be first up the narrow stairwells. Under these circumstances, it’s not surprising that Kiwi runner Melissa Moon was stricken with nerves before this year’s Empire State Building Run-Up in February.
But Moon, who had twice won the world mountain running championships, had a secret weapon – meditation. “I was terribly nervous, so I did what I’ve done before in world champs. Before going to the competition, I lay on my bed and concentrated on my breathing and on getting into a meditative state. When I got up, I was in the zone of action.”
At the starting line, one of Moon’s toughest competitors looked terrified. “We all felt like that, but she didn’t have it under control. She let the adrenalin get the better of her, and went off too fast.”
Moon, however, managed to stay focused for the 13 minutes and 13 seconds it took her to emerge on the building’s observation deck as the clear winner of the women’s race. Sport, she believes, is at least as much about the mind as it is about the body.
Although meditation is well known as a stress-reliever and a tool for relaxation, Moon and many other practitioners value the technique for its ability to increase mental clarity during performance.
In recent years, a growing body of research has found that meditation has such a powerful effect on the mind that it can increase the size of the brain. Studies have also suggested mediation can help with a wide variety of medical conditions, including heart disease, cancer, asthma, high blood pressure and chronic pain.
Meditation may also help to alleviate conditions such as anxiety disorders, sleep problems, eating disorders and depression. Earlier this year, Britain’s Mental Health Foundation called for “mindfulness” treatment – a combination of meditation and cognitive therapy – to be made more widely available to help reduce the use of antidepressants.
Meditation seems to stimulate activity both in the parts of the brain associated with positive emotions and happiness and the parts that control functions such as blood pressure and digestion, which are particularly susceptible to stress.
In 2006, researchers at Harvard, Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the areas of the brain dealing with attention and with processing sensory input were thicker in people who practised Buddhist insight mediation – which involves paying attention to sights, sounds and other sensory experiences without actually thinking about them – for an average of 40 minutes a day. Although the changes were more pronounced in long-term meditators, they were also visible in people who had been meditating for as little as a year.
Meditation has been practised for thousands of years, but it wasn’t popularised in the West until the Beatles returned from India in the 1960s to sing the praises of Transcendental Meditation (TM). Last year, the two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, performed together to raise money to enable the David Lynch Foundation to teach a million children to meditate.
Meditation can be as simple as focusing on a candle flame, a word or a breath. The aim is to focus the attention in a calm way, rather than being continually distracted by external noises and internal thoughts. Achieving inner peace isn’t easy, but many people who meditate regularly say they are more self-accepting, less troubled by unhelpful thoughts, less tense and more able to live fully in the present.
Moon never sits cross-legged to meditate: she’s more likely to meditate while walking or running. For her, it’s all about settling the thoughts and clearing the mind. She concentrates on her breathing, and sometimes uses key words and phrases to help her focus.
One phrase Moon often uses is the Maori saying kia kaha (be strong), although for the Empire State Building race she drew on a quote from an article in a running magazine she’d read on the plane to New York: “Fighter – and I will scrap to the end”. But in her day job, as an outreach worker with the Compassion Centre soup kitchen in Wellington, Moon chooses phrases based around the idea of compassion.
“If you can learn through meditation to control your thoughts, that can change your emotions and your behaviour,” says Moon. “Meditation isn’t a quick fix, but it’s very powerful.”
