Meditation and Healthy Aging

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Meditation and Healthy Aging

• Elaine J. Yuen, PhD
• Thomas Jefferson University
• American Public Health Association
• November 8, 2004

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Background

• Meditation is one of the oldest and most widely
  practiced mind body therapies
• Meditation practices support
• An understanding of subjective experiences
• An improved quality of life
• An understanding of psychosocial factors that
  play a central role in health and healing
• Research has examined relationships between
  meditation and clinical treatment for conditions
  such as cancer, depression and anxiety, and heart
  disease

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Issues for Elders

• Life stresses
• decreasing physical and mental abilities
• increased dependence within their living
  situations
• changing family dynamics
• Underlying view of meditation gives caregivers
  and elders perspectives that address
  impermanence, death and dying
• Old age is a naturally contemplative time of life
• Slowing down and attending to details that
  characterize old age are analogous to the
  practice of meditation
• A contemplative view may be incorporated into
  hospice and palliative care where elders and
  caregivers face loss and change

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Benefits of Meditation

• Relaxation response different from that induced
  by physical exercise
• Psychological balance that allows the experience
  of emotions while maintaining perspective on them
• Integration of physical being, emotional
  impulses, and conscious thoughts
• Can be practiced concurrently with existent
  religious beliefs

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Practice of Meditation
The practice of mindfulness is inherent in all
human beings. In meditation we are continuously
discovering who and what we are. We begin to
discover our basic mind and heart. Often we
think about meditation as some kind of unusual,
holy spiritual activity. As we practice, that is
one of the basic beliefs we try to overcome. The
point is that meditation is completely normal it
is the mindful quality present in everything we
do. Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

• Meditation practices
• Breathing or a mantra as focal point
• Nonjudgmental awareness to see repetitive
  patterns of behavior
• Allowing thoughts and feelings to occur without
  invoking patterns of response so that insight is
  gained into involuntary habitual reactions

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• Mindfulness
• Placing attention on the breath to stabilize the
  mind and rest awareness in the present moment
• Cultivates a nonjudgmental state of openness and
  relaxation that can be maintained throughout
  daily activity
• Transcendental Meditation (TM)
• Sitting with eyes closed for 20 minutes and
  attending to a syllable or word (mantra)
• Whenever thoughts or distractions arise,
  attention is directed back to the mantra
• Herbert Benson used TM with other therapies to
  reduce heart rate, blood pressure, metabolic
  speed, and alleviate stress

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Meditation in Medical Settings

• Evidence that the mind has a meaningful role in
  health maintenance and disease recovery has
  fueled interest in meditation as a treatment in
  medical settings
• As a primary therapy to treat specific diseases
• As an injunctive therapy in comprehensive
  treatment plans
• As a way to improve quality of life for those
  with chronic illnesses
• Meditation teaches patients how to cope with
  stresses of illness and treatment, as well as
  gives an increased sense of control and spiritual
  experience

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Studies of Physiological Effects

• Pain and Fibromyalgia
• Reductions in present-moment pain, negative body
  image, inhibition of activity by pain, symptoms,
  mood disturbance, and psychological symptoms
• Hypertension and Cardiovascular Disease
• Relaxation response
• Decrease in exercise-induced cardiac ischemia
• Regression of coronary artery stenoses
• Cancer
• Addresses psychological disturbances and stress
  experienced during treatment

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Psychology of Meditation

• Dealing with a stressful medical condition may be
  subsumed into the larger goal of coping with the
  stresses of life
• Meditation practices support coping with distress
  and disability in daily life, as well as
  addressing depression, anxiety and affective
  disorders
• Meditation decreases stress through
• Reducing overall psychological symptomatology
• Increasing a sense of control in ones life
• Increasing ones spiritual experiences

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Loss and Change

• Meditation practices may help to give perspective
  to life as elders physical and mental abilities
  operate at a slower pace
• Elders often feel marginalized by the rapid pace
  of our society, and struggle to keep up
  producing chronic stressors
• There may be fear and hesitation to directly face
  inevitability of impermanence, loss, and
  disorientation
• Grieving process, dissolution of familiar
  patterns must be acknowledged

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Resolving Hopes and Fears

• Deeper goals of meditation include developing a
  sense of harmony within the universe and
  increased compassion
• These values may be increasingly important to
  elders as they work to understand physical
  declines, impending death, and the loss of
  friends
• Through the non-judgmental acknowledgement of
  thoughts, hopes and fears, meditation practice
  provides a context where anxieties about physical
  and mental functioning may be faced, felt, and
  understood

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Memory and Mindfulness

• Elders and their caregivers often face concerns
  of memory loss and inability to concentrate
• Mindfulness practices aim to bring enhanced
  awareness to ordinary day-to-day events
• For example, support development of mental
  strategies to address misplacing glasses
• Langer (1989)
• Through mindfulness exercises, a group of nursing
  home residents were able to improve memory and
  attention
• Elders engaged in mindful learning were more
  active, alert, and happy

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Working with Sterotypes about Aging

• Even for those not acutely ill, there is often an
  unarticulated awareness of diminishing abilities
• As ordinary as not being able to drive
• Dependence on others for help in activities of
  daily living
• Meditation practices may help elders free
  themselves from stereotypes our culture holds
  about the aged of being frail, infirm, and
  chronically ill
• Elders often require support to be able to grieve
  these smaller functional losses, as well as to
  work through larger issues of sickness and death

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Spiritual and Emotional Support for EldersThe
challenge of old age is to allow the dissolution
of form, to open to that. Elders cannot do it
alone, our culture is so unsupportive, people go
to pieces in despair

• Elders often struggle to articulate meaning and
  value as physical and mental abilities change
• Meditation provides an environment which allows
  elders
• To experience their physical and mental
  impermanence
• To develop a larger view of their lives beyond
  the fear of loss of control or dying

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Issues for Caregivers

• Caregivers focused on addressing elders problems
  often neglect self-care issues
• Meditation practices may address
• Burnout and compassion fatigue
• Working with death and dying
• Establishing mindful home care or palliative care
  environments

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Conclusions

• Utility of meditation practice has been generally
  well established
• Most current research in effects of meditation
  have not focused on elderly age groups
• Anecdotal evidence shows that meditation
  practices are able to give elders insight into
  their losses and grieving by allowing conflicting
  emotions to surface
• More formal research investigating the outcomes
  and mechanisms of how meditation works with
  elders and caregivers is needed

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Buddhas Teaching at the Time of His Death

• O bhikshus! Do not grieve! Even if I were to live
  in the world for as long as a kalpa, our coming
  together would have to end.
• You should know that all things in the world are
  impermanent coming together inevitably means
  parting. Do not be troubled, for this is the
  nature of life. Diligently practicing right
  effort, you must seek liberation immediately.
  Within the light of wisdom, destroy the darkness
  of ignorance. Nothing is secure. Everything in
  this life is precarious.
• Always wholeheartedly seek the way of liberation.
  All things in the world, whether moving or
  non-moving, are characterized by disappearance
  and instability.
• Stop now! Do not speak! Time is passing. I am
  about to cross over.
• This is my final teaching.

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Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka
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Shambhala Buddhist Meditation Center, Baltimore,
Maryland