Meditation

Lifestyle medicine is the use of daily activities to improve health and quality of life rather than relying on drugs and medical procedures. My emphasis is on diet but I have also addressed exercise in past blogs. Another well documented approach is meditation.

Commonly used meditation techniques come from either the Vedic (Hindu) or Buddhist traditions. Buddhist approaches include mindfulness and focusing on something constant like breathing. The Vedic tradition uses a mantra, either aloud or just in thought. Both approaches have millions of devotees and millennia of history with successful application. I have tried both approaches over the past many decades but have never developed a long term regular practice.

In the early 1980's I took the Transcendental Meditation(TM) course and I used that technique regularly for six months or so but drifted away from regular practice. Our next door neighbors in Kauai are both long time TM teachers and one of them recently gave me a refresher session on TM practice and suggested a book, Super Mind, which I've read and will discuss in a subsequent blog.