Mystic Mantra: What meditations can do for life

Recent studies have shown that regular practice of meditation can have an incredibly positive impact on health like lower blood pressure, heart rate and respiration, reduce anxiety and anger, and help alleviate insomnia, mild to moderate depression, as well as lead to other benefits. Many doctors and researchers have speculated about the reasons meditation produces these effects, but a credible scientific explanation has been elusive until now.

A new study by Richard Davidson from the University of Wisconsin and Jon Kabat-Zinn from the University of Massachusetts is likely to provide a significant first step to answering the question of what goes on in the brain during meditation. The researchers sought to test a particular theory: that in people who are stressed, anxious or depressed, the right frontal cortex of the brain is often overactive and the left frontal cortex, relatively underactive. Many such people also show heightened activation of the amygdala, a key brain center for processing fear.

By contrast, people who are usually calm and happy typically show greater activity in the left frontal cortex, relative to the right. These folks also pump out less of the stress hormone cortisol, recover faster from adverse events, and have higher levels of the white blood cells that battle infection and are a measure of immune system function. These early studies suggest that the subtleties of mind, long known subjectively to proficient meditators, may prove capable of being understood objectively as well. What researchers are trying to prove clinically has been the experience of meditators down the millennium. In the modern world, Osho prescribes active and cathartic meditations devised scientifically by him. They have been working wonders on thousands of people.

He says, “The practice of meditation will have many physiological symptoms too. Some physical diseases can disappear, longevity can increase, and many chemical changes can take place in the body. Numerous glands of the body that are at the moment as good as dead can be activated. Meditation has profound chemical effects on the body. In fact, the whole chemistry of the body changes. The body begins to perceive, think and understand things in a different way altogether. All the electric circuits of the body change.”

Just as lots of things happen at the level of the body, so also a great deal occurs at the level of the mind, too. The possibilities are numerous. By living unconsciously, we accumulate many toxins in the body and an archive of thoughts, memories, and wounds in mind. Osho’s active meditations cleanse all this debris and rejuvenate the entire system.  It is terrific that this has been supported by the scientific research because it will attract younger educated people who like to test everything on the touchstone of science, to meditation which will completely change their life for the better.