healing meditation for helané wahbeh, nd, mcr ......© institute of noetic sciences meditation for...

© Institute of Noetic Sciences

Meditation for Healing

Quieting Your Mind to Boost Your Body and Experience

Transcendence

Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR

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● Apple● Google● Nike● AOL Time Warner● Yahoo!● Deutsche Bank● Procter & Gamble● HBO

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Not So Uncommon

@30 million Americans meditate 2009 (17 million in 2002)

@200 and 500 million people meditate world wide

http://nccam.nih.gov/news/camstats/2007/camsurvey_fs1.htm

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Growing Interest

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Clinical Application

Used successfully with diverse populations

● Healthy adults

● Adults with chronic illness

● Children and adolescents with chronic illness

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Growing Evidence for Meditation

● Psychiatric disorders (Goldberg, 2018)

● Anxiety, Depression, Stress (Khoury, 2013, 2017; Goyal, 2014; Goldberg, 2018)

● PTSD (Hilton, 2017)

● Pain (Khoury, 2013, Goyal, 2014, Hilton, 2017)

● Sleep Quality (Rusch, 2019)

● Quality of Life (Khoury, 2016) ● Positive prosocial emotions and behaviors

(Luberto, 2018)

● Longer telomere length (Schutte, 2020)

● Physiological markers of stress (Pascoe, 2017)

Effects stronger compared to wait list but still positive when compared to active control conditions.Effects are sustained.

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What Is Meditation?

● Meditation 5,000 year old known history originated in the East.

● Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality meta-analysis of meditation practices “definitions of meditations can be variable.”

● Agree on:○ self-observation of mental activity

○ attention training

○ cultivating an attitude that highlights process rather than content

Ospina, 2007

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How Does Meditation Work?

● Attention regulation

● Body awareness○ Emotion regulation

○ Reappraisal and exposure, extinction, reconsolidation

○ Self-compassion

○ ↓ Rumination and experiential avoidance

● Change in perspective of the self

Hölzel, Lazar et al. 2011, Grecucci, Pappaianni et al. 2015; Chiesa 2015.

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(Afonso, 2020; Boccia, 2015; Fox, 2014, 2016; Kim 2020; Shen, 2020)

Structural Brain Changes• impacts neuronal plasticity

Functional Brain Changes• Gray/white matter changes

Brain Changes During Meditation

Deactivate Default Mode Network Activate regions ~ cognitive and emotional control

Brain Changes with Meditation

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Meditation Types

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Short-Term Brain Changes

Two imaging studies with interventions (Massachusetts General/Harvard)

fMRI - MBSR vs. controls

● Emotion regulation - amygdala

● ⇧activation L hippocampus○ Learning/memory processes

○ Self-referential processing

○ Perspective-takin

Holzel, 2010, 2011

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1) help participants understand their personal reactions to stress

2) teach them skills to modify their stress reactions

3) promote their desire for self-care and feelings of competence and mastery

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For Older Adults with Depression

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IMMI for General Public

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iRest Yoga Nidra

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https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmxXQfMFe0sXaCbOSBmww7qOIAFCtYKoI

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Transcendent States

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/QCQwSC3mihE/hqdefault.jpg

State of awareness free from content• Absorptive• Unitive• Undifferentiated• Adaptive• In harmony with reality

Accompanied by feeling of joy and/or bliss

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Transcendent States

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Transcendence associated with…

● Respiratory suspension

● Slowed breathing

● ↓ muscle activity

● Experienced as a state of relaxed wakefulness in a phenomenologically different space-time

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Transcendence associated with…

EEG - ↑ alphaVs. other meditation states

● ↑ functional connectivity

● ↑ coherence

● ↑ whole brain activity

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Acknowledgments

Mental Insight FoundationJennifer BishopRoger Ellingson

Wyatt WebbIrina FonarevaElena GoodrichMeghan Miller

Laura Carim-ToddAndy Fish

Barry OkenNIH T32 AT002688, K01 AT004951,

U19 AT002656 and UL1 RR024140