The Science of Meditation by Daniel Goleman

Author:Daniel Goleman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780241975701
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

HYPERTENSION? RELAX.

The moment you woke up today, were you breathing in or breathing out?

That hard-to-answer question was put to a retreatant by the late Burmese monk and meditation master Sayadaw U Pandita. It bespeaks the extremely conscientious and precise version of mindfulness he was renowned for teaching.

The sayadaw was the direct lineage holder of the great Burmese teacher Mahasi Sayadaw, as well as spiritual guide to Aung San Suu Kyi during her years-long house arrest before she became Burma’s head of government. On his occasional trips to the West, Mahasi Sayadaw had instructed many of the best-known teachers in the vipassana world.

Dan had traveled off-season to a rented kids’ summer camp in the high desert of Arizona to spend a few weeks under U Pandita’s guidance. As Dan later wrote in the New York Times Magazine, “The consuming task of my day was to build a precise attention to my breath, noticing every nuance of each inhalation and exhalation: its speed, lightness, coarseness, warmth.”11 The point for Dan: clear the mind, and so, calm the body.

While this retreat was one of a series Dan tried to fit into his yearly calendar in the decades after returning from his graduate school sojourns in Asia, it wasn’t just meditation progress he hoped for. Over the fifteen years or so since his last long stay in India, his blood pressure had gotten too high, and Dan hoped this retreat would lower it, at least for a while. His physician had been troubled by readings over 140/90, the lower border of hypertension. And when Dan returned home from retreat, he was pleased to find a reading far below that borderline.

The notion that people could lower blood pressure through meditation largely originated with Dr. Herbert Benson, a Harvard Medical School cardiologist. When we were at Harvard, Dr. Benson had just published one of the first studies on the topic showing meditation seemed to help lower blood pressure.

Herb, as we know him, served on Dan’s dissertation committee, and was one of the few faculty members anywhere at Harvard sympathetic to meditation studies. As later research on meditation and blood pressure have shown, he was on the right track.

Take, for example, a well-designed study of African American men, who are at particularly high risk for hypertension, cardiac and kidney disease. Just fourteen minutes of mindfulness practice in a group who already suffered from kidney disease lowered the metabolic patterns that, if sustained year after year, lead to these diseases.12

The next step, of course, would be to try mindfulness (or some other variety of meditation) with a similar group, but who had not yet developed a full-blown disease, compare them with a matched group who did something like HEP, and follow them for several years to see if meditation headed off the disease (as we would hope—but let’s try this study to see for sure).

On the other hand, when we look at a larger set of studies the news here is mixed. In a meta-analysis of eleven clinical

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