HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES
By William J. Cromie
Gazette Staff
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.
Why would
anyone do this? Herbert Benson, who has been studying g Tum-mo for 20
years, answers that "Buddhists feel the reality we live in is not the
ultimate one. There's another reality we can tap into that's unaffected
by our emotions, by our everyday world. Buddhists believe this state of
mind can be achieved by doing good for others and by meditation. The
heat they generate during the process is just a by-product of g Tum-mo
meditation."
Benson is an
associate professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and
president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center in Boston. He firmly believes that studying advanced
forms of meditation "can uncover capacities that will help us to better
treat stress-related illnesses."
Benson
developed the "relaxation response," which he describes as "a
physiological state opposite to stress." It is characterized by
decreases in metabolism, breathing rate, heart rate, and blood pressure.
He and others have amassed evidence that it can help those suffering
from illnesses caused or exacerbated by stress. Benson and colleagues
use it to treat anxiety, mild and moderate depression, high blood
pressure, heartbeat irregularities, excessive anger, insomnia, and even
infertility. His team also uses this type of simple meditation to calm
those who have been traumatized by the deaths of others, or by diagnoses
of cancer or other painful, life-threatening illnesses.
"More than
60 percent of visits to physicians in the United States are due to
stress-related problems, most of which are poorly treated by drugs,
surgery, or other medical procedures," Benson maintains.
The
Mind/Body Medical Institute is now training people to use the relaxation
response to help people working at Ground Zero in New York City, where
two airplanes toppled the World Trade Center Towers last Sept. 11.
Facilities have been set up at nearby St. Paul's Chapel to aid people
still working on clearing wreckage and bodies. Anyone else who feels
stressed by those terrible events can also obtain help at the chapel.
"We are training the trainers who work there," Benson says.
The
relaxation response involves repeating a word, sound, phrase, or short
prayer while disregarding intrusive thoughts. "If such an easy-to-master
practice can bring about the remarkable changes we observe," Benson
notes. "I want to investigate what advanced forms of meditation can do
to help the mind control physical processes once thought to be
uncontrollable."
Breathtaking results
Some
Westerners practice g Tum-mo, but it often takes years to reach states
like those achieved by Buddhist monks. In trying to find groups he could
study, Benson met Westerners who claimed to have mastered such advanced
techniques, but who were, in his words, "fraudulent."
Benson
decided that he needed to locate a religious setting, where advanced
mediation is traditionally practiced. His opportunity came in 1979 when
the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibet, visited Harvard University.
"His Holiness agreed to help me," recalls Benson. That visit was the
beginning of a long friendship and several expeditions to northern India
where many Tibetan monks live in exile.
During
visits to remote monasteries in the 1980s, Benson and his team studied
monks living in the Himalayan Mountains who could, by g Tum-mo
meditation, raise the temperatures of their fingers and toes by as much
as 17 degrees. It has yet to be determined how the monks are able to
generate such heat.
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.
Benson believes that such a capability could be useful for space travel.
Travelers might use meditation to ease stress and oxygen consumption on
long flights to other planets.
In 1985, the
meditation team made a video of monks drying cold, wet sheets with body
heat. They also documented monks spending a winter night on a rocky
ledge 15,000 feet high in the Himalayas. The sleep-out took place in
February on the night of the winter full moon when temperatures reached
zero degrees F. Wearing only woolen or cotton shawls, the monks promptly
fell asleep on the rocky ledge, They did not huddle together and the
video shows no evidence of shivering. They slept until dawn then walked
back to their monastery.
Overcoming obstacles
Working
in isolated monasteries in the foothills of the Himalayas proved
extremely difficult. Some religious leaders keep their meditative
procedures a closely guarded secret. Medical measuring devices require
electrical power and wall outlets are not always available. In addition,
trying to meditate while strangers attempt to measure your rectal
temperature is not something most monks are happy to do.
To avoid
these problems, Instructor in Psychology Sara Lazar, a Benson colleague,
used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of
meditators at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The subjects
were males, aged 22-45, who had practiced a form of advanced mediation
called Kundalini daily for at least four years. In these experiments,
the obstacles of cold and isolation were replaced by the difficulties of
trying to meditate in a cramped, noisy machine. However, the results,
published in the May 15, 2000, issue of the journal NeuroReport, turned
out to be significant.
"Lazar found
a marked decrease in blood flow to the entire brain," Benson explains.
"At the same time, certain areas of the brain became more active,
specifically those that control attention and autonomic functions like
blood pressure and metabolism. In short, she showed the value of using
this method to record changes in the brain's activity during
meditation."
The biggest
obstruction in further studies, whether in India or Boston, has always
been money. Research proceeded slowly and intermittently until February
2001, when Benson's team received a $1.25 million grant from Loel
Guinness, via the beer magnate's Kalpa Foundation, established to study
extraordinary human capacities.
The funds
enabled researchers to bring three monks experienced in g Tum-mo to a
Guinness estate in Normandy, France, last July. The monks then practiced
for 100 days to reach their full meditative capacity. An eye infection
sidelined one of the monks, but the other two proved able to dry frigid,
wet sheets while wearing sensors that recorded changes in heat
production and metabolism.
Although the
team obtained valuable data, Benson concludes that "the room was not
cold enough to do the tests properly." His team will try again this
coming winter with six monks. They will start practice in late summer
and should be ready during the coldest part of winter.
Benson feels
sure these attempts to understand advanced mediation will lead to
better treatments for stress-related illnesses. "My hope," he says, "is
that self-care will stand equal with medical drugs, surgery, and other
therapies that are now used to alleviate mental and physical suffering.
Along with nutrition and exercise, mind/body approaches can be part of
self-care practices that could save millions of dollars annually in
medical costs."
