Posts Tagged ‘Meditation’
Western medicine meets the meditative tradition
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
Here are some brief excerpts from a most-interesting article about the Dalai Lama at the Mayo Clinic.
It’s one thing to ponder the irony of a professional-seeming protest [against the Dalai Lama] in defense of a government that does not allow protest. It’s quite another thing to witness the brain trust behind the brand more associated with Western medicine than any other giving forum to the emerging science of mindfulness training, acceptance, positive thinking and compassion. The first cause is about political change. The second is cosmological.
Thanks to the Dalai Lama’s public embrace of science, and his personal embrace of Mayo Clinic Rochester Minnesota for his health care, the clinic had been able to …organize an elite gathering of mind-body science practitioners….
The Dalai Lama has long believed that so-called mindfulness meditation has beneficial effects on human health and well-being, and thanks to research conducted by Davidson and others, we now know that the brain and body do indeed change for the better as a result of such practice, and through measurable physiological pathways more complex than had previously been imagined.
