2031 Frontiers of Healing: The Relation Between Spiritual
& Medical Healing
Dr. Herbert Benson, Harvard Medical School and President
of the Mind
Body Medical Institute 
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Dr. Herbert Benson |
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Dr. Herbert Benson, groundbreaking mind/body researcher and
author of numerous books about the Relaxation Response, spoke
to an enthusiastic crowd of over 500. His research, which
began by validating the use of meditative techniques in healing,
has moved in recent years to include studies of prayer in
medicine. In his introduction, the Rev. Thomas Mikelson of
First
Parish in Cambridge (UU)
said, “If researchers like Dr. Benson take career risks
in this frontier of healing, how can we in liberal religion
not support him?” Benson’s latest book is The
Breakout Principle: How to Activate the Natural Trigger That
Maximizes Creativity, Athletic Performance, Productivity and
Personal Well-Being (co-authored with William Proctor).
Benson provided an overview of how his thinking evolved regarding
the mind/body connection. He came to mind/body research with
“trepidation and foot-dragging,” said Benson.
“What right did a young cardiologist have to try to
bridge the gap between science and religion?”
Health, Benson said, is like a three-legged stool, and is
supported by three types of treatments: pharmaceuticals, surgery,
and self-care. Most of us believe that we need only two of
these legs, and neglect our own self-care. In fact, 60% to
80% of doctor’s office visits are poorly treated by
drugs or surgical procedures. Not that the third leg is all
we need: ten years ago, as the result of a bad fall, Benson
related how he broke five ribs and would have died from collapsed
lungs and internal bleeding if not for surgery. Over half
of the audience raised their hands when he asked how many
would not be here today if it weren’t for drugs or surgical
intervention. The third leg needs to be integrated with the
first two — it cannot stand on its own — for true
health care.
Many people confuse self-care with alternative medicine,
Benson reported, but they are very different. Self-care has
been scientifically proven to be effective (as he went on
to explain), while alternative therapies have not. (When they
are, they cease to be alternative.) Self-care is something
you do for yourself, while alternative medicine (like conventional
medicine) is done to you. And self-care is inexpensive, while
we spend billions each year on alternative therapies.
The third leg – self-care – includes the Relaxation
Response, nutrition, exercise, stress management, and belief
in spirituality. These methods can be integrated, and then
combined with drugs and surgery for a truly integrated approach
to medicine.
Many years ago, said Benson, for many of the patients he
diagnosed with high blood pressure, he prescribed drugs, and
then found that he had over-prescribed, ending up with blood
pressure that was too low. Was the stress of the blood pressure
test itself inducing high blood pressure? To find out, he
taught squirrel monkeys to increase their blood pressure (in
some cases, to the point of death), and then taught them to
lower it again. Could this finding apply to humans?
At this point, practitioners of Transcendental Meditation
(http://www.tm.org/) approached Benson and asked him to study
their ability to affect their bodies through thought. This
was in 1968, when stress was rarely studied, and the idea
of studying meditators was novel, to say the least. He would
have turned the TM groups down were they not so insistent,
and even when the studies started, Benson scheduled them after
hours. His group measured various indicators of bodily activity,
including oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide elimination,
respiration, heart function (ECG), and brain function (EEG).
After hooking up measurement equipment, each TM practitioner
had an hour to get used to the equipment, and then spent some
time just thinking, some time meditating, and some more time
just thinking. Each of the indicators dropped during TM, and
rose again during “just thinking.” They had a
significant decrease in oxygen consumption, with breath rates
dropping from an average of 16 breaths per minute to 10 or
11 (in Tibetan monks, respiration rates as low as 1 per minute
have been measured).
What was going on? The only known alternative states at that
time were sleep and hibernation. Sleep involves a dip in respiration,
but the change is slow, over hours. A meditator’s breath
rate drops in minutes, and the EEG during meditation differs
from sleep. What about hibernation? Animals in hibernation
show a huge decrease in body temperature, which TM doesn’t
show. (Benson noted that bears’ winter temperature doesn’t
drop much, so bears actually sleep, rather than hibernating
all winter — and commended the courage of the researchers
who ascertained this armed only with rectal thermometers.)
No, the meditative state was neither sleep nor hibernation.
Ironically, Benson’s research took place in the same
rooms in which Dr. Walter D. Cannon identified the “fight
or flight response,” in which danger causes an increased
heart rate, breathing, and blood flow. Stress evokes the fight
or flight response, but in the modern world, we rarely either
fight or run away. Instead, our response causes anxiety, depression,
cardiac arrhythmia, and a lowered pain threshold, which causes
a vicious cycle of increased stress-induced pain. The fight
or flight response also relates to insomnia, decreased sperm
count and sexual response in men, and increased hot flashes,
PMS, and infertility in women. And bad medical news can create
stress, which causes the fight or flight response, which worsens
the patient’s state.
The meditative state, which Benson named the Relaxation Response,
is the opposite of the fight or flight response. The Relaxation
Response isn’t a technique: it’s a state evoked
by TM. Benson doubted that TM was the only way to achieve
this state, and found that the Relaxation Response is easy
to evoke. You need two things:
- Repetition of a word, sound, prayer, thought, phrase,
or activity.
- Passive return to repetition when other thoughts intrude.
(The Relaxation Response is described more fully in Benson’s
book of the same name.) Benson discovered that every culture
with written records has found these same two elements:
- The Upanishads (7th century BC) say to achieve the presence
of God, focus on your breathing and repeat words from the
Vedas.
- During the period from the 4th century BCE to 1st century
CE, Judaism included the practice of squatting in a fetal
position and rocking while chanting the name of a magical
seal. In 14th century Spain, Jewish mystics repeated the
name Adonai.
- In early Christianity (in the 2nd to 4th century CE),
the Desert Fathers knelt, focused on their breathing, and
repeated Jesus name, discarding other thoughts. In the Middle
Ages, monks repeated “Christe eleison.” In The
Cloud of Unknowing, a 19th century monk described similar
meditations.
- Shinto, Confucianism, and shamanistic religions include
prayer repetition, counting breaths, chanting, dancing,
and drumming.
Outside of religion, others described the same techniques.
The Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson and philosopher
Henry David Thoreau would fixedly gaze at the sunlight on
a leaf, discarding other thoughts. Wordsworth meditated on
falling water, and Tennyson repeated his own name while walking
on the beach.
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Dr. Herbert Benson |
Benson tested the Relaxation Response with student testers,
asking them to count their breaths up to 10, and then starting
again at 1. The tests failed! The students would lose count,
panic, and stop. When the testers were told to repeat the
number 1, the tests worked perfectly (and may also have proven
that Harvard students can’t count past 1). By repeating
“one” with each breath, the students evoked the
same Relaxation Response as TM. Testers who repeated prayers
had the same results. Recent technology has corroborated these
findings with new types of brain scans.
Measurable, repeatable, and predictable — reliable
ways to evoke the Relaxation Response were scientifically
established. Benson’s team had begun to construct the
third leg of the three-legged stool to complement the other
two legs of conventional medicine. Specifically, to the extent
that a condition is caused or made worse by stress, the Relaxation
Response is an appropriate therapy. It can work for anxiety,
depression, hostility, hypertension, cardiac arrhythmia, pain
management (although not the pain itself), insomnia, PMS,
infertility, the nausea and vomiting of chemotherapy, the
symptoms of cancer, and the stress-related aspects of auto-immune
diseases — always in conjunction with appropriate drug
and surgical therapies.
Patients can choose their own word, phrase, or action, reported
Benson. Yoga, drumming, and the pre-suggestion stage of hypnosis
also work. Eighty percent of patients choose prayers appropriate
to the religion, including “Hail Mary Full of Grace,”
“The Lord Is My Shepherd,” “Om,” and
“Om Mane Padme Hum.”
Interestingly, people reported that they became more spiritual
if they regularly evoked the Relaxation Response, for from
10 to 20 minutes once or twice a day. What does this mean,
wondered Benson. Jared Cass, the dean of Leslie College, and
his team found that people meant two things by “increased
spirituality,” regardless of the words they used:
- They felt the presence of god or a higher power.
- The presence was close to them or in them.
Most interestingly, said Benson, those who reported feeling
increased spirituality had fewer symptoms.
For the last few years, Benson has led Harvard Department
of Continuing Education “Spirituality and Healing in
Medicine” conferences. This fall, the conference will
concentrate on forgiveness.
Dr. Sarah Lazar compared Sikhs repeating animal names to
repeating prayers, and found marked differences in their state
of quietude. In this state, the autonomic nervous system and
amygdala (which controls emotions) became more active, making
the person open to new ideas. In church, what usually follows
the meditation? The sermon! This openness following meditation
can be misused; think of Nazis repeating salutes and chanting
“Heil Hitler,” or Jim Jones in Guyana. However,
we can use this moment of openness to foster our own creativity,
athleticism, or enhanced spirituality.
Benson expanded on the idea of the meditative state followed
by a break-through state, with a four-phase model:
- Struggle phase, when you work at the issue
- Release phase, when you back off (the Relaxation Response
provides this, too)
- Break-out phase, when you are open to peak experiences
- New normal state
This cycle has been documented since Moses doubted God and
then parted the waters through to the present.
In summary, Benson emphasized that he hasn’t discovered
anything new. He’s now describing in scientific language
what people have known for millennia. William James in The
Varieties of Religious Experience said, “An athlete
... sometimes awakens suddenly to an understanding of the
fine points of the game and to a real enjoyment of it, just
as the convert awakens to an appreciation of religion. If
he keeps on engaging in the sport, there may come a day when
all at once the game begins to play itself through him —
when he loses himself in some great contest. In the same way,
a musician may suddenly reach a point at which pleasure in
the technique of the art entirely falls away, and in some
moment of inspiration he becomes the instrument through which
music flows ... so it is with the religious experience of
these persons we are studying.”
Reported for the Web by Margy Levine Young; Web Design
by Julie Albanese |
