Mediation has come a long way in the past 10 years. After a long period during which its association with the ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ culture of the 1960s and ’70s meant it was not taken seriously as a therapeutic tool, it has made a comeback in a very different guise. Hundreds of clinical studies around the world offer new evidence of the positive physical and mental health benefits of meditation, and its application is now being used by cancer patients and those suffering from depression, anxiety, chronic pain, substance abuse, PTSD, eating disorders, even psychosis.

Clinical psychologist Elizabeth Foley was one of the first people in Australia to write a PhD on mindfulness meditation, in 2004. She recalls how unfashionable it was at the time. Even when a mindfulness clinic was set up for cancer patients at Royal Prince Alfred (RPA) hospital in NSW in 2006 with Foley in charge, she faced a lot of resistance. “There was a stereotype of meditation as being a wishy-washy thing that wasn’t doing anything at all,” she says. But that attitude continues to change and meditation is beginning to be welcomed into clinical practice with two hospitals, the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne and the RPA, now having mindfulness meditation as part of their pain management strategy.

Else Lackey was diagnosed with breast cancer almost two years ago and had a mastectomy in January 2009. “It was catastrophic. I felt doomed and wasn’t coping well emotionally. During the day I was so agitated and I needed so much distraction and then I couldn’t sleep.”

Lackey’s counsellor at Nepean Hospital in the western Sydney suburb of Penrith was keen for her to try anti-depressants, but Lackey wanted to develop her own resources to cope. So the psychiatrist recommended an eight-week course on mindfulness at a Cancer Council hub in the community connection centre in Penrith.

“You learn to ‘dance with the problems’,” says Lackey, who was sceptical before she enrolled. “You do the best you can and there’s no judgement, no striving, there’s no wrong way to do this. The main thing is to try to stay in the present moment and set aside time every day to practise.”

The course provides a CD and a workbook and participants keep a diary: one week they might be asked to write about pleasant events that have happened and another week it might be unpleasant events – recounting physical, emotional and mental reactions. “You become more receptive to what’s going on in your body that way,” says Lackey. “My big fear was that I couldn’t cope with anything physical, so if I got a twinge or a headache, everything becomes the cancer. Now using the mindfulness techniques, I don’t panic in the same way I used to. You’re in the sea and you’ve got nothing to hold on to and it’s like having a raft. Meditation has let me be more comfortable with being close to the abyss.”

Dr Belinda Siew Luan Khong, a practising psychologist and lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, says the openness of Western healthcare professionals and clients to meditation in therapy is not impetuous; a sudden discovery or a ‘love affair’ with these practices. “Meditation and mindfulness are no longer perceived as alternative, but rather as complementary approaches. In psychotherapy, these Buddhist practices are regarded as a significant and important adjunct to therapy.”

The origins of the mindfulness techniques come from Buddhist vipassana meditation made popular in the West by Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor of medicine and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In the 1970s, Kabat-Zinn developed a course in mindfulness-based stress reduction, in which he used meditation to teach patients how to “pay attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgementally”.

Foley explains that the technique works “by training our attention to be with things that are happening in the present: paying attention to the sensations of breathing in and out, the taste of food, the sounds around us or the feel of one’s feet in contact with the ground”. It’s this ‘connectedness’ to the here and now that Buddhists, and people who have been meditating for many years, often describe – allowing them to engage with the world at a more considered level and break down some barriers between themselves and their fellow human beings. Mindfulness is understood to make us kinder to ourselves and to others – and that’s good for our health.

From a scientific point of view, the question is: how do we measure the 
effects of meditation on the brain? Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electroencephalograph (EEG) scans allow researchers to observe which parts of the brain are more active than others at any one time. At the University of Wisconsin, for example, researchers led by Dr Richard Davidson studied the brain activity of a group of Tibetan monks while they were meditating using MRI. The expert meditators showed significant brain activity in the insula, which helps gauge emotions and monitors responses such as heart rate and blood pressure and part of the right side of the brain that controls empathy.

They concluded that meditation was helping the monks to be more compassionate to both themselves and to others and this, in turn, was useful in preventing depression and dealing with stress.

Food, and our attitude to it, has become an area of intense anxiety for many in the West in recent times. At Queensland’s Griffith University, Dr Angela Morgan from the school of psychology has performed research with women suffering from various eating disorders. She used meditation mindfulness techniques with women between the ages of 19 and 66, and the results after eight two-hour sessions showed significant decreases in levels of depression and anxiety, reduced binge eating and registered improved self-esteem and body image.

“I have worked with many people who struggle with their minds about food,” says Morgan. Their internal dialogue goes: ‘I really feel like chocolate/No I can’t have chocolate/I’ll just have one piece, and then I will run for an extra 20 minutes tomorrow.’ Eventually the ‘bad’ thoughts win out and the person ends up eating the entire block, and then feels terrible and guilty and out of control.”

Morgan says that mindfulness helps them break out of this vicious cycle by disengaging from the struggle with their thoughts and better managing the cravings.

It seems, too, that meditation can have a preventative effect in warding off illness. Last year, for example, researchers at Harvard Medical School published evidence that people who were long-term practitioners of relaxation methods such as yoga and meditation had very active disease-fighting genes compared to people who didn’t use any relaxation techniques. In particular, they found genes that protect us from disorders such as infertility, high blood pressure and rheumatoid arthritis, and those that limit pain, were switched on. “The relaxation response,” said Dr Herbert Benson, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who led the research, was a phenomenon that could be just as powerful as any medical drug but without the side effects. The good news was that these genes can be switched on as well as off – once the control group started practising meditation techniques, their genes 
also began to switch on.

It is in the US where some of 
the most groundbreaking applications of meditation are happening, with mindfulness appearing on the school curriculum. The Association for Mindfulness in Education supports mindfulness training as a component of schooling from kindergarten to year 12 and research feedback shows that children are benefiting through increased social skills; better attention, memory and organisational skills; increased 
self-esteem; greater calmness and improved sleep patterns as well as decreased ADHD, anger management and anxiety issues. With so much at stake for future generations, the question seems to be can we afford not to embrace meditation on a much wider scale?