Meditation
by Kerim
I’ve been meaning to write about the topic of “stress” for a while. Considering that this month marks the highest levels of stress I’ve had to face in the last few years, it seems like a good time to start. I’ve even established a new category: “health” where I’ll be filing these posts. It just so happens that Jonathon Delacour recently wrote a post on “pressure” as well, so maybe there is something in the air. The election results certainly didn’t do much to relieve global stress levels!
Anyway, today’s post is fairly short, and it is just to point to this article about research done by Herbert Benson, who has been studying Tibetan g Tum-mo meditation for 20 years.
In a monastery in northern India, thinly clad Tibetan monks sat quietly in a room where the temperature was a chilly 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Using a yoga technique known as g Tum-mo, they entered a state of deep meditation. Other monks soaked 3-by-6-foot sheets in cold water (49 degrees) and placed them over the meditators’ shoulders. For untrained people, such frigid wrappings would produce uncontrolled shivering.
If body temperatures continue to drop under these conditions, death can result. But it was not long before steam began rising from the sheets. As a result of body heat produced by the monks during meditation, the sheets dried in about an hour.
Attendants removed the sheets, then covered the meditators with a second chilled, wet wrapping. Each monk was required to dry three sheets over a period of several hours.
… The researchers also made measurements on practitioners of other forms of advanced meditation in Sikkim, India. They were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent. “It was an astounding, breathtaking [no pun intended] result,” Benson exclaims.
To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation.
You can see footage of these monks if you go to this page, and scroll down to the segment titled “Just Relax.” (You can even go faster if you use the menu to select the section which starts with the words: “This is northern India…”). The whole show is worth watching, and I intend to write more about it later. I just wanted to start the series off with something fun. The point of course is that even simple meditation can help humans avoid many of the negative effects of chronic stress. More later!
I’ve been meditating 2x a day for 4 years now, through 9/11, birth of a kid with 2 club feet, struggle of other kid with developmental delays, cancer, hubbie’s job outsourced – plus all the grief of the continuing mess in the Mid-east…The meditation practice I do keeps me on an even keel. If I skip a session I get jumpy and nasty as a dope addict. I’m not perfectly serene for even an hour of every day, but I do believe that the meditation has helped me make it through big life crises without losing my marbles.
For what it’s worth, I do a TM practice that I learned from a teacher who got kicked out of the TM movement for being gay. I don’t like cults and I have no way of assessing most of TM’s claims, some of which verge on the ridiculous, but the practice sure works for me. I never could stick with mindfulness or other Zen practices I learned. But to each his own.
Re: the cold sheets trick – that’s nice for them. However for me meditation calms me down, helps relieve stress and anxiety, and seems to have SLIGHTLY modulated my high-octane Semitic temper. I don’t have much use for feats of wonder…and I think most people trying to get through life don’t either.
Thanks for bringing up the topic, Kerim!
Thanks for sharing that. I’m working up to talking about my own Iyengar Yoga practice, but I need to set the stage with a few more posts first.
For the monks the “cold sheet trick” is not a “trick” but a meaningful religious ritual. The generation of body heat is seen as a means of eliminating “impure thoughts” and is a deeply private practice, which used to be a closely guarded secret.
The real question (for scientists such as Herbert Benson) is why do people like yourself feel that meditation is so useful? In other words, why does it work? The monks can teach us something about that, and I hope to discuss what that is more in later posts. The link to the full article about the monks is fixed now (sorry about that) and I suggest taking a look at it, as it talks more about why this research is meaningful. Herbert Benson has been one of the main proponents of simple relaxation techniques for ordinary people, so I think he would agree with you that it isn’t necessary to do a trick like this to get the benefits of meditation!
On second glance, my comment sounds awfully snide. I’m sorry. I think it was meant in the “if you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him” tradition. After many years on a spiritual path, I’ve learned to be suspicious of bright lights and wondrous visions. But I appreciate your explication of why the cold sheet meditation matters, and I take back my judgmental comment.
Not that the monks are harmed by my limited mind, but I am sorry to speak unkindly and from ignorance.
The point of the post wasn’t very clear. Hopefully it will become clearer in retrospect as I post more. I just thought it was a fun way to introduce a new topic to the blog.