The Science of Meditation

ladies and gentlemen thank you for joining us this evening my name is Dustin Boyer and I would like to welcome you to the science of meditation to my left here is Perry Peltz she's an accomplished documentary filmmaker and public health Advocate currently co-directing and co-producing the conversation on race series in the New York Times opdoc series her films include remembering the artist Robert De Niro senior the education of DD Rick's and a journey of a Thousand Miles peacekeepers Peltz has recently completed a documentary about alcohol use disorder to air on HBO in 2017 as a product is in production on another documentary for HBO about the drug overdose epidemic Perry take it away thank you so much thank you Dustin and welcome everybody Welcome to the science of meditation um this may be the wrong room to ask this in because here we are in Aspen but how many people here would say they're stressed okay that's good I was afraid no one would put their hands up but then I'd be well not now have you ever been stressed right yeah so that's where I was going to go yeah okay like okay no one's stressed you know what um okay so you were at the right and the right panel but I want to read something that I found online about what it is alleged that meditation can do for you and I'm going to read this meditation can help with stress improve cognition improve physical and mental health reduce anxiety depression provide a heightened sense of well-being bring greater happiness emotional self-control improve sleep that is a lot of things and being the skeptic that I tend to be I didn't actually buy into a lot of this and I came to visit my friend Bob Roth over here who I'm going to introduce in a second and we had a wonderful conversation about really what is the science behind this and whether there is something to these many claims that are made about meditation so now it's with great pleasure that I get to introduce Bob Bob Roth is one of the most sought after meditation leaders in the United States teachers teachers teachers what did I say leaders oh I actually I wrote teachers but I'm editing as we go um he's done this he's taught meditation for more than 40 years is that good okay got that he is the executive director of the David Lynch Foundation which has brought meditation to more than 500 000 inner city youths in underserved schools in 35 countries as well as to Veterans and their families who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and women and children who are survivors of domestic violence in addition to that Bob is the host of the Sirius XM radio show success without stress what did I forget nothing okay perfect all right you want to say who got me that show um okay before we get though to the science of meditation it's I think important for us to even to understand what meditation is so Bob why don't you tell us a little bit about what it is we're actually even talking about how many people here practice have have tried some form of meditation okay no actually that's the question on this equation how many people here eat healthy how many of you eat healthy on a pretty regular basis how many of you exercise how many of you exercise now I just said how many of you have meditated yeah now how many of you meditate on a regular basis yeah that's what this is to talk about because we eat well on a regular basis we exercise well on a regular basis we dabble on the meditation and it turns out that meditation is absolutely essential now because we live in an epidemic to answer your question we're living in an epidemic of trauma and toxic stress and that cuts across all all demographics and the science the understanding of the impact of stress on our life I mean there's books and books we all we all know and particularly I'm working with adolescents and we just had a meeting earlier today talking about the Adolescent brain and how it's being sculpted and right now is being sculpted for an adult brain that is chronically fatigued chronically fearful chronically anxious and that's informing what their lives are going to be like so the problem of stress is huge the second reason of three is that modern medicine has no magic pill to either prevent stress or cure it I mean we can we mask it with six glasses of wine or five cups of espresso before six in the morning or we can um manage it with Ambien and Xanax and these different things we can manage it but nothing Curative and why meditation now one answer science science I've been at this for 45 years teaching 45 years and when I look over over time you know they've been research on mindfulness and Transcendental Meditation been around 10 years or so but suddenly it's just coming to the surface it's no the word meditation wasn't it like when I was younger as a as a TM teacher someone would ask my parents so what is your son Bobby doing they go truth what but now it's a different story we're doing programs in all the big Banks and professional athletic teams and schools and VA hospitals and it's science so it's science you know and I'm having a stressful moderator moment because I forgot to mention to everybody that if you want to join this conversation and participate online in the online conversation that the hashtags are Spotlight health and Spotlight Aspen ideas at meditation Bob and at Perry pelts okay so we got that out of the way um Bob I'm curious and I don't know if sometimes it's like when you learn a new word and all of a sudden you see the new word all over the place but I feel like there is so much discussion now about meditation why now well so the interesting thing for the longest time we have the longest time as long as I remember the word meditation maybe 10 years ago first of all science really didn't take it seriously and if they said anything about it it was all lumped into the word meditation it didn't really matter what you did oh yes you meditate well you can jog or you meditate and you count your you know your breath or I meditate when I cook or I meditate when I listen to music or I do TM meditation or mindful it was all sort of didn't matter what you did 15 20 minutes or two minutes that was just the significance was you just broke do you take take a break break in the action then about five seven years ago brain research started showing up because we know that every experience that we have changes the brain in a distinct way so if we listen to heavy metal music or we listen to electronic music we listen to Beethoven or if we're watching sorry the Warriors lose this lose the seventh game which was very hard on me after 47 years of meditating still hard on me um that that changes the brain in a different in case you didn't know it that was a reference to a basketball team um so it changes the brain in a distinct way and so it turns out that there are three distinct types of meditation and they didn't know that before and there's a lot of nonsense in the name of meditation and if I'm answering too long you can just cut me off no no I'm you're just checking off my questions here but you can't we're good so there's um three distinct types of legitimate meditation but means science-based evidence-based this is a lot of junk out there the first is called focused attention and focused attention is your basic classical Zen meditation it's clear your mind of thoughts you know you're at the end of a yoga class and say okay now you're going to meditate you're going to clear your anybody ever tried that I I yeah successful recently yeah that's good because when I was told to do that I thought okay and then I'll create peace in the Middle East you know because I have a very busy mind type a mind but it's a concentration it's a focused meditation and that creates what's called gamma brain waves gamma is 20 to 50 cycles per second it's often in this pair the left frontal lobe and um the positive meditation is that that sort where you're just caught you're focused it can be on your breath it can be a point in your body it can be on an idea I'm going to be loving loving kindness so it's a concentration second type is called open monitoring and open monitoring is um a lot of mindfulness and I should say that I've been trained in all these practice all these I teach Transcendental Meditation so one that I've practiced and taught the longest but I I'm not a siloing person so open monitoring means a non-judgmental observation of thoughts of breath of moods of feelings it's to become just sort of step back and that creates Theta brain waves and Theta brain waves five to seven cycles per second and that is a sort of an inner wakefulness just a sort of attention to detail it's it's not quiet as much as engaged and then the third is called self-transcending and that is trans includes Transcendental Meditation and that's neither concentrating like if you have waves you know trying to clear the mind of thought it's not just observing your thoughts it's actually experiencing the thought process at quieter and more settled and calmer levels of the mind and when that happens your body gets a deep breath but the main thing there is that creates Alpha One and that's eight to ten cycles per second and that is a state of deep inner wakefulness okay great because when you start talking about alpha waves and gamma waves I think you're already moving into the science here yes but then I'll download it back that's good because that's a good segue for me um when you talk about the science which is really what we're here about this evening about the science of meditation Bob in all series is when you look at this list of things that I find about what meditation can do for you reducing anxiety depression increasing well-being sleep all of these things that is claimed that it does what is the science how do you know that in fact these things are actually happening it's a mental technique that impacts the brain and the Brain impacts the body and the Brain impacts the mind so anxiety depression insomnia lots of that is okay so there's I'm going to make this simple for me and you there's two key areas of the brain we're going to talk about one is the prefrontal cortex the frontal lobes you've heard that yeah that's the one that doesn't come in until you're 25. those of you who have teenage children yeah it starts at 12. it doesn't lock in until you're 20. right exactly so that is about it's the size of your fist it's behind your forehead and that is um judgment is this you know all this or can I go through this okay judgment planning decision making sense of self ethical reasoning Innovative thinking creativity it's the they call it the CEO of the brain because all the other information information comes into the brain and here's the CEO which decides and discriminates and and judges then there's another part of the brain which is part of the limbic system which would just say is the amygdala and that's the fear Center and that is fight or flight you've all heard that term fight or flight now when everything is in Balance the prefrontal cortex is on board and it's discriminating and it's deciding and it's going along and when you're about to be chased by a tiger or you're in Fallujah then the amygdala kicks in and it gets hyper aroused and then what happens is the energy that was going to here to sort of thinking in a clear rational way that shuts down the prefrontal cortex shuts down and now the amygdala takes over and now I fight or I or I flee or when it's really extreme then I freeze that's fine if you're in the savannah or if you are on a battlefield but it's not fine if this tells me where I'm if you're stuck on the FDR and you really need to be someplace and you are really getting upset because this has been going on day after day and you know how could they keep doing so much construction on the FDR during a weekday and so the FDR for those of you not from New York City is a roadway in New York City that's 405 yeah often very congested so what's happening is Modern Life with with so much stress so much stress and chronic stress that we've lost the ability to sleep we've lost the ability to um have about the brain but to be balanced what happens is the amygdala kicks in and it's hyper aroused and this shuts down and now I am anxious all the time and my body is secreting something called cortisol you've heard of that cortisol hormone stress hormone improper balance it's great we need it but what happens is the adrenal glands which sit on the on the kidneys start pumping out a lot of cortisol and then my anxiety becomes more anxious becomes more anxious becomes more anxious becomes a vicious cycle and then you have people who have panic attacks and what's going on in all of this is the frontal lobes the clear thinking the planning the Judgment the decision making goes offline and now I'm overreacting to everything is that clear and that becomes a chronic feature of life and then I can't sleep and then when I can't sleep it gets worse because sleep if new research on sleep shows that there's a lot of activity going on in the brain when we're sleeping and this toxins are being purified and is absolutely essential I later on talk about work with kids but well you know what what wages I think one of the things that's interesting is that there actually are studies that show differences and changes on MRI when people are meditating I was wondering if maybe you could just talk about one of the areas on MRI and EEG the MRI particularly for meditations this part of your of your brain the frontal lobe on the left is associated with positive feelings of positive well-being and there are mindfulness practices where you are culturing that positivity well-being and you can actually see the growth of gray matter in that part of the brain so you're developing the brain's ability to be positive you can take control over your emotions your moods through this mindfulness type of one of these mindfulness techniques first of all I should say mindfulness is many many many techniques it's not just one there's mindfulness eating and mindfulness walking and mindfulness breathing and mindfulness Hatha Yoga says many many different approaches but you can see that on the fmri you can also see the amygdala which is the fear Center through certain mindfulness approaches calming down during during mindfulness meditations and then the other area I'm talking about is the electrical activity in the brain and that you can see with Transcendental Meditation you can see the connections between the neural Pathways between the front of the brain and the back of the brain and the whole brain starts to communicate and connect with each other all the different parts you know when Bob and I initially had this conversation about the science of meditation my first thought was well these are probably some really small studies probably had some really small places and in fact it's not the NIH has funded what more than 26 million dollars just to study transcendental health and high blood pressure just on high blood pressure and it founded American Heart Association came out two years ago and said that Transcendental Meditation was the most effective tool for reducing high blood pressure in many regards as effective as antihypertensive medication with no uh hazardous no negative side effects so what are the most exciting areas Bob right now that are that you're are that are being researched and that you're seeing actual changes and improvements I know that you're working with women who have been uh victims of domestic abuse you're working with people who have post-traumatic stress disorder so you're working with a lot of people who have had trauma what is it that's most interesting and exciting to you right now it's an interesting thing because the epidemic of trauma and Trauma doesn't have to be just a bomb went off in you know a roadside bomb and Fallujah we all exp First Responders um experience post-traumatic stress disorder caretakers if you have someone in your family who has post-traumatic stress or as a veteran it's contagious and again there's the we're working with the VA the Department of Defense just gave several two and a half million dollars for a big study on the effects of Transcendental Meditation on post-traumatic stress as well as on traumatic brain injury and we're doing research at um the VA hospital in uh San Diego and a in Augusta Georgia at a VA Hospital there on traumatic brain injury and what they're finding is number one one of the first things that happens when they learn TM is they start sleeping for the first time because this meditation gives the body like that a state of rest in many regard well two to three times deeper than just sitting with your eyes closed and in some regards deeper than sleep and that alone it's an amazing experience for me to teach a veteran who hasn't literally can you imagine slept for months and then they they learn the meditation and they sleep 18 hours a night for three or four nights in a row so there's a lot a lot of research in that area the research the most mainstream research that's going on is with the heart disease but we're starting to work now um I'm in discussions with Mount Sinai Hospital about the effects of TM on prion set Alzheimer's working with Michael J fox who I taught to meditate on the effect of TM on Parkinson's he doesn't mind I tell this story when he sits when he does TM he sits to meditate like that all the Tremors stop just it I'd never seen anything like that and then it's done for 20 minutes and then that's incredible yeah and he runs a big foundation he has to do research on it and at last that calm lasts for like 10 minutes or 20 minutes after and sometimes we'll just sit there and he'll just look at his hand do you have a thesis about why that might be it's someone here is an expert in Parkinson's but it's a it's a neurochemical and I have no idea it's even when I talk to other um people in the field of Parkinson's they don't know but this is not isolated it's incredible that really is all right I'm going to give Bob a break from my questions do you want to show anything before we go to the questions are you which one would you like I like the show for me one of the most satisfying like I've been I've taught thousands of people to meditate can I just a little background of myself yeah of course okay so actually let me ask you the question Bob can you tell us a little bit about how is this work that we know each other so well one of my questions was Bob can you tell us a little bit I want to talk about because I'm like the least I wanted to say this I'm like the least typical if you think of a meditation teacher I'm like the least likely meditation teacher I'm like a really skeptical person I'm a cynic about a lot of stuff I'm not into woo-woo I'm not into New Age stuff I you know I'm just like a regular guy and I just briefly so I grew up in a very political family in the 1950s and 19. this is how I'm why I'm running the foundation I'm explaining why I'm dedicated myself to doing it and the name of the foundation is the David David Lynch Foundation yes and so I was like you know I grew up a very political family in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1950s and early 60s and my family was so political and some of you will relate to this that I knew that I was a Democrat before I knew I was Jewish right some of you can relate I mean we just we just that was we just talked politics and I was the Jewish kid in the family that wanted to in those days you know change the world and so I worked for Bobby Kennedy when I was a senior in high school and I saw him three day in San Francisco three days before he was assassinated and that was a huge blow to me and I went to UC Berkeley in 1968 and I wasn't a druggie and I wasn't a hippie and I wanted to change the world and it was so insane and politics was so abusive that I lost my passion for politics and I'm getting to the answer is this too much no no okay all right um I lost my passion for politics I thought okay education I really wanted to work with underserved kids so I was in the educational curriculum and a friend of mine stressed out of my mind because I had tanks parked outside my door and I was working full-time and going to school full-time and the guy said you should learn Transcendental Meditation and my first response was not on your life I have enough issues with my own religion because I thought it was what everybody thinks and he said no it's not and it's you don't have to believe in anything and it's restful and I learned it in one of my first thoughts after learning to meditate was I want to teach this to Inner City school kids that was 1969. so I became a teacher in 1972. and I went back to the Bay Area and I taught it at San Quentin prison I taught men on Death Row and guards and I taught it and if you know San Francisco in the um Mission District and and Hunter's Point and then 10 and I just taught it forever and then 10 years ago David Lynch and I got together start a foundation to bring this to at-risk kids and then it went to veterans and now women and children and this video is a little three-minute video with our work with the Family Justice Center in New York which I think is one of the most marvelous organizations ever and it's designed to provide tools and training for women who are survivors and children survivors of domestic violence this is I think a three-minute video the person who had assaulted me it almost tried to actually kill me finally I found a way to escape but I had no money and nowhere to go being homeless that feeling I think is the worst feeling I've ever had and because there was so much stress I started losing my hair as well okay at that point I felt I just [Music] he will just bid me up until he sees I'm unconscious choke me until I passed out and unfortunately he did these things in front of my child when I look back to or what I went through it's truly a miracle that I'm alive I was a platoon Sergeant over in Iraq as soon as that truck in front of mine blew up oh hell broke loose and here come the puss just all over the place I sustained multiple injuries to my face torso stomach and legs in November the 18th 2011. still in the window ledge and shoved my eyes and said in prayer and was about to jump I know what got me in that window ledge but I also know what got me out of that window Midge and why I'm here now when I started practicing Transcendental Meditation I just felt new refreshed of reborn and my hair started growing back I'm very happy about that I think if it changed my life it could change anyone's life um it's like miraculous to learn DM being like a life-changing experience I feel hopeful life that has been great for so long became back to colors I wish everybody have the opportunity to learn this [Music] I believe in my heart that Transcendental Meditation is a humongous portion of the reason why I'm still sitting here now to know that something as small of a concept of 20 minutes twice foreign you know you wanted to change the world when you were a kid you have you really have that's an amazing video um anything that you want to say about what we just saw yeah that um I had a meeting with a woman from the U.N women and was talking because the problem of traumatic stress in developing countries is and so she asked me a question she said what what would you like to do David Lynch Foundation what would you like to do and I said I'd like to teach a million women to meditate in the next 10 years in Africa and she said no one has ever said this to me you're thinking too small she said what are you talking about here it's not buildings it's not medicines it's not Technologies it's just a whisper teaching a person to meditate she said come back to me when um when you have a plan to teach a hundred million people to meditate wow and it just made me realize is it epidemic and it's not going to go away if we're hoping it's just going to go away turn to Blind Eye it's that that's what fueling terrorism that's what's fueling violence in our cities that's what's viewing domestic abuse ultimately we need to make changes in education and and health care but we also have to address that underlying um epidemic I want to get to people's questions and I'm going to ask that since we're recording this this is being recorded right now that when you're called on if you could stand up please state your name and then ask your question speaking directly into the mic and what we're going to do is pick two people at a time one person from each side of the room and then we'll start with the person on my left and then go to the person on the right so any questions from people in the audience okay we'll start with the woman in the white shirt in the back and anybody on this side and this gentleman over here and let's start please with the with the woman in the back row my name is Katie Shaw um as the media I feel has paid a lot more attention to meditation and describing It In Articles the last few years I've given especially the last year or so a lot of thought to what is really the difference between that and prayer if you're a religious person and I don't mean that flippantly no it's a great question you could just talk about that um the difference between that prayer and Transcendental Meditation is prayer is content based it's more of it's a it's an emotional and a mental desire wish or communication and Transcendental Meditation is much more physiological I work I teach a lot of Catholic priests and nuns and most of the people who learn TM at least in America are judeo-christian tradition it just I look at as a physiological thing it gets rid of stress so that when I pray or or when I do anything I'm more present I am more myself so that that's there's no belief system involved with Transcendental Meditation the other thing I want to drive home this point when I said in the beginning all meditations were lumped together and now there we understand there's three basic types my feeling has been that there's too much siloing that oh I do mindfulness so I don't have to do this or I do that in mind and I think that's so wrong I think we have to look at the key word for me is evidence-based if there's data that shows that something works then we should investigate it because it's a big war out there with stress and so I'm I'm in favor of when we go into a school that we give the children a toolbox of how to handle stresses and not just handle stress but wake up their brain strengthen the frontal lobes then in a toolbox there's more than one tool and so prayer is something that will only be enhanced by just like exercise prayer is enhanced by being healthy did that answer your question that's a great question thank you you take the gentleman over here please I'd like to what's your name my name's I'm sorry my name is Larry Larry and I'd like to know where the evidence that you're talking about is and three things that you would refer people to besides you you yourself is and I like to you know see where the verification is very good question there have been uh in terms of mindfulness there's more research on that so this enormous amount of research on mindfulness published in peer-reviewed journals and you can you can go to something called um mbsr mindfulness-based stress reduction John cabotzin at MIT is heading that up it's a very legitimate form of mindfulness and you'll see a full documentation of the published research and when it comes to Transcendental Meditation you can go to David Lynch foundation.org and you'll see the data there but suffice to say with Transcendental Meditation there have been 370 studies published in peer-reviewed journals over the last 40 years the most recent ones were in the American Medical association's Archives of internal medicine and the American Heart Association Journal hypertension and lesser ones I mean not lesser but more specific ones things for intelligence or depression or anxiety so all that I'm talking about here is is uh backed by published research in peer-reviewed journals every every word that I've said being studied in 200 independent universities and institutions correct right yes your follow-up wait hold on we need the microphone sorry we're being recorded yeah what we like what I like to see is if you hand out something that that says where it is right absolutely the question being where is it that you can find this information and I think a great resource is the David Lynch Foundation which is the website name is foundation.org but um I didn't know when I came here that I could provide materials so I came bashfully without materials but if you give me your contact information I will absolutely get that information to you and I'm actually going to do this I know it sounds anybody can email me directly with any question at Bob David Lynch foundation.org that is in fact my email so if you have a question because I want to I think the problem of stress and anxiety and depression and substance abuse and opiate addiction and all these very serious and it requires serious skeptical investigation and I'm happy to answer any question that you have okay do we have two more questions we need a question from the gentleman over here and over on the right sorry over here okay uh let's start please over here my name is Brad and I work at a school first through 12th grade with kids who have learning disabilities a lot of Social and emotional delays you know some I think of it as trauma associated with those delays and struggles and I just started a class through mindful schools and I'm going to be starting working with the students in the fall teaching them mindfulness is there anything else that you would suggest in terms of training or areas to look into and research to augment what I've started with the mindful schools program mindful schools be sure and I know that organization is data driven and take a look at the work we're doing we call it quiet time the David Lynch Foundation it what it does is it provides TM instruction and it's done for 15 minutes at the beginning of the school day and 15 minutes at the end of the school day the whole school is quiet which is a remarkable thing and the principle everybody is quiet and they they don't all have to meditate they can do silent sustained reading or they can do um even nap but within six months ninety percent of the kids are wanting to meditate that is a complimentary program to what mindful school is that again what Transcendental Meditation does it's a great preparation it's the focus is on learning Readiness so the kid comes to school and then who knows what he or she has eaten who knows what's going on at home and now they're supposed to study algebra and so the whole CL the whole school begins with a few minutes of of meditation and if there's time I want to tell you a very moving story about that all right we'll get to that in a little bit yeah so one thank you for the presentation uh so I was curious uh Skippy mezero okay curious you've been talking not about a general meditative practice but about a specific one being TM and I was wondering if you could break down to us what distinguishes or what distinctive characteristics T ham has versus other meditative practices and why those make it more effective um I hoped I wasn't I I hoped I wasn't just talking only about TM because um I mentioned that the point about um because it's very important to me that I'm I'm not just one that's my expertise I teach it but I've learned all these other ones but there's an enormous amount of research on mindfulness and it's a it can be a wonderful coping tool for example in mindfulness practices if a person is very anxious and and a student or then the mindfulness approach actually you can see it calm the amygdala Transcendental Meditation doesn't do that Transcendental Meditation is done before that anxiety kicks in and it makes the frontal lobes stronger and less the amygdala less likely to sort of become hyper aroused but then having that tool for calming the amygdala is also important so I think it's like comparing sit-ups and push-ups you know they have different purposes and different outcomes um again that example you're on a little little boat on the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and all of a sudden you get these giant 30-foot high waves and you could think the whole ocean is an upheaval and if you can do a cross-section of the ocean you realize that there's 30-foot high waves but the ocean is a mile deep and at the depth of the ocean it's silent and the surface of the ocean is choppy and turbulent and the depth of the ocean is silent and the it's analogous to our mind the surface of our mind I like to call it the gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta mind I got to do this and I got to do that and I got to call him and I got to call her and I gotta make a list and I got to find the list and I got to make a new list then I gotta slow down then I gotta get going and I gotta get to sleep and I got anybody have that so that yeah that's that now how do we deal with that and that's where meditation comes in and there are three basic approaches to meditation all valid and a meditation of a concentration form of actually the word meditation just means thinking so a concentration form of meditation is concentrating the mind on a particular Focus like my breath and every time I Dre I focus and that as I said creates the gamma brain waves and that is a fabulous cognitive training for concentration and then the second was the mindfulness or open monitoring and that's observing thoughts but it's not just observing thoughts there's body scans we start from the top of your head and you just observe experiences all the way down and that but that's a dispassionate observation and that among other things is a phenomenal coping tool which I have used because if in the middle of the day things get hot then you can take two minutes and then the third is just self-transcending where you we hypothesize that every human being right now right now is just a hypothesis every human being has a level of the Mind deep within which is already quiet and silent that's just a hypothesis and Transcendental Meditation provides access to that I feel that all three skill sets are essential for dealing with life in 2016. so I'm not I know more about TM and and I was invited to sort of speak about all the science but I'm a big fan of anything that's evidence-based I'm not a fan of people who just jumping on the bandwagon and they got some Gadget and there's no evidence to show that it works not a fan of that that's just we're non-profit organization I I I I don't like that so much but if there's science and it's repeated and it's published in peer-reviewed journals four or five times not just once it's not just anecdotal that's something we have to really look at okay you know I wanted to to talk about some of the the mechanics of what we're speaking about because when you speak about the gotta gotta gotta gotta brain I remember when I decided I was going to learn how to meditate and I went to a class that Bob would teaching and the one of the first things that came up is that this was going to be 20 minutes you needed to do this 20 minutes twice a day and I thought well this is a problem um but then I thought no problem because I'll use that time to go through my lists I'm actually not joking a multi-tasker meditator right this is fine it'd be nice quiet moment to really get through those work but we've moved through that it was it was good but Bob talk a little bit about TM and what are some of the mechanics that are involved how can somebody do this so there has been for the longest time the assumption that the Mind want if if you know different types of meditation sorry over there if you know different types of meditation there's the assumption that the mind wanders aimlessly it's the monkey mind and you have to Corral it you have to you have to stop that you have to create calm where there's no calm and in Transcendental Meditation there's another insight and the Insight is the mind is not wandering aimlessly it's not just the mind is natural tendency of the mind is to be drawn towards something more satisfying you're sitting in a room and you're listening to some really wretched music and in the other room some unbelievable music comes on where does your mind naturally where does it get drawn to it gets drawn to that more Charming music you're at a cocktail party I'm sure this has never happened to you you're stuck in a corner in a Dreadful conversation and there's no escape and you're dying inside and five feet over here there's interesting people within interesting conversation maybe telling a joke and you've got eye contact here but you are about to laugh and the the mind is going is just drawn to that which is more satisfying or as I said before you go on you go on vacation you bring two books and one is terrible and one is fantastic and the terrible one you can't read and the Fantastic one hours go by so the mind is drawn to something more satisfying in our hypothesis and what I love about genuine meditation there's no belief you can be a hundred percent skeptical we in this hypothesis this quiet level of the mind is a very satisfying experience it's my own inner nature and in Transcendental Meditation you receive what's called as a mantra or a word or a sound that has no meaning because if it had a meaning you're stuck up there trying to figure out what that is and you're taught how to use it to effortlessly access that calm and I can teach a 10 year old child who has ADD who couldn't close her or his eyes for 10 seconds and the meditation takes about an hour a day over four days and that child is 10 minutes twice a day and loving it it's not an acquired skill it's we're hardwired for it were we going to do a group you're going to do something yeah we're at the very end okay um how much where's Dustin how much time 15 minutes okay so let's do some more questions and then we'll do the but then I want to show the last video do you want okay well what would you like to show that now nope okay let's take some more questions um okay woman over here in the second row and you know what the young lady over there in the back who's been very patient but let's start right here hi I'm Lynn Waldorf and I am a professional coach and I've had the incredible honor to work with a couple of people who were in Special Forces for a number of years and they have post-traumatic distress and have trouble sleeping and when they I wanted to get kind of a give you an example and maybe you could tell me a little more about the mechanisms of how transcendental meditation helps them but when this one fellow closes his eyes to try to sleep he's back in the in the in the war zone and bullets are coming at him so he opens his eyes and wakes up in order it's it's like a reaction a survival reaction so how does Transcendental Meditation help help a person first of all we teach every veteran for free any veteran who comes to the foundation who wants to learn to meditate they they learn for free and actually we do programs in Banks and we charge extra and they say where's that money going and I said it's going to pay veterans so that they can learn for free and the guy says well what if I don't want to pay the extra then I say then I'm not teaching you and they pay and they like it and the veterans so it's a nice start to the relationship yeah it works no they like it you know it's a non-profit uh when a when a person comes who has severe trauma and there we are have a whole team of teachers who are trained to work with them they don't start with 20 minutes they could start with 30 seconds they and then it could build up and the same actually I work with non-verbal autism children on the Spectrum who can't sit with their eyes closed or schizophren people with schizophrenia or even bipolar you build up the time so you build up the time and we have specially trained people and it's safe and um it really works I mean the the Iraq I mean the the Wounded Warrior Project just funded we just taught about three or four hundred veterans and the results that are coming in from that study is just extraordinary I'd like to expand this did all the veterans I mean we should yeah I teach all the veterans we teach for free because not that many people know about it and if we have more funds come in then it all goes to the veterans and their families because the veterans can't is not in isolation it's the children it's the spouse it's the parents it's it's so Bob at David Lynch foundation.org email me and I'll give you the information yes in the back I'm Bo and I was wondering um you were talking about the prefrontal cortex in the amygdala yeah and I was wondering if the hippocampus had anything to do with it it's good that is really good I have to just I was traveling you know David Lynch a filmmaker Twin Peaks and all that so I was traveling and uh some interesting films you know um blue velvet and so we were in Scotland or something like that a little child got up and said I've seen blue velvet four times and David said where's your parents yes the hippocampus is involved with memory and um what happens with stress too much stress and the hippocampus is the one part of the brain that actually creates um new brain cells and that's really important keep neurogenesis keeps creating new brain cells and stress particularly cortisol when cortisol hits when it hits the hippocampus it too much of it actually shrinks the hippocampus and that's why stress one reason why stress when we have too much stress our memory goes because that's your memory Center stress also shrinks the um prefrontal cortex and that's why life happens you know just again judgment planning decision making but the hippocampus is very important has a very important impact on stress and there's no research specifically on TM and the hippocampus but there is research and also mindfulness on reducing cortisol levels and so that has a healthy influence on on the hippocampus and therefore memory thank you for that that's a great question you know that makes sense too because if you're in the fight or flight mode you probably don't want to be bogged down by a lot of memories right no and you're also not going oh there's a tiger chasing me well let me just think of my options here we should talk about we should look at it as Bears since we're here okay yeah and the garbage yeah right right exactly okay why don't we show the video okay so let me lead into this this the last thing and then we'll do a little meditation I just you know maybe it's just my leftover 60s stuff but I I just find at-risk populations who don't get much of a Break um it's very satisfying for me to be able to offer this and this came up because a person in San Francisco who's a meditator said I want to fund a research study at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation because when a person is diagnosed with AIDS it creates unbelievable amounts of anxiety and then that lowers T cell and it compromises the immune system so this is a video which is one of my favorite and then we'll do everybody will get to do their meditation there's very few things as stressful as saying you now have a life-threatening disease and probably it's going to kill you I was in rehab when I found out I was uh both hep C and HIV and I thought my world was going to crumble I found out February 14 1997 that I was HIV positive I was panicked I didn't know which way to go I was a benefits analyst for many many years and I worked at several health plans I was in my place for 20 years my landlady died and then in a really aggressive judicial process I found myself locked out of my place I ended up out on the street after a few months because I exhausted my my friend's couches I came here in 1968 when I was 11 years old from El Salvador there was very few immigrants so there was no such thing as english's second language class so it forced me to learn English I wanted to find out about the SAT tests I asked my high school counselor I said oh don't worry about it you know you you being here is a flu that's what she told me you know I'm a Latina you know it's the early 70s when I took the SAT test I scored 1400 which is I put me in the top one percentile of the nation you could be really bright and still do stupid things my husband sold drugs he used drugs too and then I used drugs and after he died I started really using more drugs and which is how I got HIV infected when someone has a life-threatening illness it triggers the fight or flight response and the fight or flight response lowers immunity and so there's a vicious circle that happens when I found out that my T cells were around 300 and dropping and there was not a lot that was being done to address it I started to panic it was tough living day to day with all the stress and not knowing what to do because we're not taught coping skills [Music] stress level goes up which causes immune system to go down so anything that the person can do that interrupts that and provides a sense of relaxation and safety will be immune enhancing TM is a great example of that I came to Transcendental Meditation through a flyer that the San Francisco Foundation posted I felt the serenity the peace that I hadn't had before the stress was slowly leaving me and the more I did it the less stress I felt when I started meditating my body began to fight back I'm currently over 1200 T cells and I feel great [Music] three months into me meditating consistently twice a day I went for probably like 215 T cells to 358 which is like 125 shirts in that three months time which I had not had ever in my time living with HIV and the only thing that I had changed in my life was the fact that I was meditating and since I've been meditating it's been consistently going up when someone feels empowered it also helps immune function and so to have a technique in your own toolkit like TM that you can Implement on your own is what we call self-empowering and that's a huge piece 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon was gonna have such such a profound effect of benefit in my life you know I used to walk with the cane and since I started meditating I no longer use a cane I like walking you know and I I walk fast I don't you know I'm you know former New Yorker man you know New York if you stroll you get trampled I'm actually gonna have a quinceanera for my HIV I'm gonna celebrate 15 years of being HIV positive you can have a full very rich life even though you're HIV positive it's no longer the death sentence that it used to be I had some of my most stoic always incredibly supportive mentors through the AIDS Foundation and I wanted to emulate that for other people and be able to give back and and I started trying to reach people and teach them about HIV hi Michael how you doing we're great friends we volunteer together in the name of hep C prevention definitely [Applause] pretty great I I maybe it's just being hyper I don't want anybody here to feel that this is you're being pushed for any particular meditation I do want you to feel pushed to take the idea of meditation very seriously in your life and research it and look into different approaches there should be an enormous amount of evidence to back it up and I also recommend you find a teacher that just trying to learn some we're going to do a little thing if we have time but yeah it's just touch it it's just meditation is far more substantive than just watching your breath or something it's we're so I just want to make that I'm very grateful to be able to be here and to talk about this and talk about the work that we're doing but there's a lot of great work that's being done with mindful schools and a lot of other areas and and I make that point let's do it okay so this is something which you've never done before there's many different types of meditation you know you can do breath and if you want to do something that you do on your own already we're just going to take a couple minutes to do this but this is um pulse with your pulse and this is a 5 000 year old meditation pulse practice which I don't think anybody is from ayurveda and you take your left hand and you put your two middle fingers wrap it around like this on your pulse like that yeah and you go like that and you just let your the fingers just rest on your pulse and if you want you can close your eyes you can open your eyes and what you're feeling is the information that's going through your body and we're just going to do this for like two minutes or something like that and it's just a connection between mind and body all right that's nice [Music] some people do that if they're chronic eating dis problems you know they eat too much do that for like a minute people don't have to see you doing it you can be under the table um that's a very calming effect it was great um first of all I just want to thank everybody for being here tonight we so appreciate it I want to thank the wonderful Bob Roth executive director of the David foundation for all the truly amazing work that you do and Bob will be around for a couple minutes afterwards if anybody has any questions for them or of course you now have his email so you can you can email him directly and thank you to the Aspen ideas festival for bringing Bob here and allowing me to do the questions Harry Peltz for the wonderful part thank you thank you

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 62,222

Keywords: meditation, health benefits, anxiety, depression, happiness, attention, brain, aspen ideas, aspen ideas festival

Id: 3r9cj1YuSyQ

Length: 60min 46sec (3646 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 26 2016