On 07/30/2012 01:15 AM, turquoiseb wrote:
A little mindfulness practice, and some could find something more
fulfilling to do with their lives than hold grudges and act them out on
Fairfield Life.
Mindfulness Meditation Could Combat Loneliness In Elderly: Study
Loneliness among the elderly has been linked with a multitude of health
problems -- including heart risks
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/18/health/mental-health/loneliness-isolation\
-health/index.html and even a higher risk of premature death
http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/07/02/hlsa0702.htm . But a
small new study is shedding some light on a tool that could hep combat
loneliness among this age demographic: Mindfulness meditation.
The study, published in the journal Brain, Behavior Immunity
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889159112001894?v=s5\
, shows that eight weeks of training in mindfulness meditation is
linked with decreased loneliness.
The study included 40 participants between ages 55 and 85, some of whom
participated in the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. People
who participated in the program were also asked to do meditation
exercises at home for a half-hour every day, and to go to a meditation
retreat for one day.
Plus, the researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found that
mindfulness meditation had positive effects on the study participants'
health, too.
Reductions in the expression of inflammation-related genes were
particularly significant because inflammation contributes to a wide
variety of the health threats including cancer, cardiovascular diseases
and neurodegenerative diseases, study researcher Steven Cole, a
professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of
Medicine, said in a statement
http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2012/july/july24_meditationstu\
dy.html .
Aside from alleviating loneliness, mindfulness meditation has also been
shown in past research to have positive effects on the brain -- linked
with brain changes that may even have effects against mental illness
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/15/mindfulness-meditation-brain-i\
ntegrative-body-mind-training_n_1594803.html , according to a recent
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study.
Heh! Right after I glanced at this I heard Gary Null citing the study
on his radio show. He had started out talking about depression amongst
the elderly and wound his way to mentioning the study. He suggested
that just a morning walk would be a form of mindfulness meditation.
However he might also say anyone practicing about any form of meditation
should get relief from depression.
But then if the depression is clinical it might take more than just
mindfulness meditation or meditation in general. It can be
nutritionally caused. Changing the diet and adding some supplementation
may help. After all in ayurveda supposedly you become more vata as you
get older though some folks may disagree as they seem to becoming more
kapha. Of course that might be from over eating to calm vata.
And situational depression may not be so easily solved by meditation
either. Of course if one is more vata they're going to be more mentally
aggravated by situational depression. And we have a lot of people in
the world suffering situational depression these day which is a result
of another form of depression: economic depression.
It's interesting to note regarding ayurveda that the metabolic
scientists say vata is an emotional state and not a body state. They
claim that pitta correlates to the fast oxidizer and kapha to the slow
oxidizer.
