Expedition: Shamatha

Meditation Speeds Treatment Of Psoriasis

From: Center for the Advancement of Health
 
Psoriasis patients who practiced meditation-based relaxation while undergoing ultraviolet (UV) light treatments experienced quicker clearing of their skin lesions than did patients who received UV treatments alone, according to results of a small, randomized controlled trial.

Use of relaxation techniques could speed the rate at which psoriasis clears and cut the number of treatment sessions, potentially decreasing the risk of skin cancers associated with UV light therapy and reducing the total cost of treatment, Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Medical School report in the September-October issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.

You're continuing for another year? You're certifiably nuts!

Hello friends, some of you have expressed interest in learning more about what we’ve been up to with the Shamatha Project, so I thought I’d post something here for the brave to wade into.  Getting ourselves set up for this year-long intensive, off phone and email, has taken a lot longer than we’d hoped, and we’ve committed to start full time tomorrow morning, so I’m going to try to knock this out quickly – forgive, if this isn’t the most coherent.

Also, I’m pulling liberally from many sources here, including Alan (our teacher) – and in the interest of time, I’m not going to footnote. 

I’ll try to answer a few key questions:

Harvard study: Meditation found to increase brain size

Original article here.

Meditation found to increase brain size

Mental calisthenics bulk up some layers

By William J. Cromie
Harvard News Office

People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don't.

Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.

In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more pronounced in older than in younger people. That's intriguing because those sections of the human cortex, or thinking cap, normally get thinner as we age.

"Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being," says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. "These findings are consistent with other studies that demonstrated increased thickness of music areas in the brains of musicians, and visual and motor areas in the brains of jugglers. In other words, the structure of an adult brain can change in response to repeated practice."