Stress and Meditation

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1. adrenaline, placing the body on full alert and preparing it both to speed up its reactions and to defend itself against injury, and
2. corticoids, the healing hormones found every day as cortisone in ointments, pills, and injections.

The response is automatic. It is no one's "fault". The body is doing its thing, in the best and only way it knows to protect itself. The problem is that in today's world you expose yourself to stress after stress after stress, though often neither literal fight nor flight is possible. You can't run; you can't fight; you can't forget the problem; you can't walk away from it. When that happens repeatedly, the body protests by giving you various mild or severe illnesses.¹

It may surprise you to learn that some of the most definitive work on the body's reaction to stress was done in the 1930s by Dr. Hans Selye at the University of Montreal.² He proved that stress does indeed kill: that bodies do not adjust to stress, do not acclimate, do not develop tolerance to it. You may think that the job stress you experience daily is not harming you; but Dr. Selye demonstrated that chronic stress does literally damage the body. We know now that such exposure to stress gradually destroys the hippocampus--which controls the production of the corticoids. When it is destroyed, no other body part remains to govern the production of corticoids. 

 The first point to note in this article, then, is that no sort of meditation you may do will heal the hippocampus once it is damaged (although we have seen some minor restoration when psychic healing is employed).

So why meditate?

There is another type of stress today which is largely ignored or denied, and about which very little is written. That is the stress arising between the different parts of your own being. For simplicity here we will talk about your being as composed of three parts:

1. The I - This is the spiritual part that you already recognize in daily speech. When you say "I love" or "I think", you acknowledge that some aspect of you loves someone else (or, for that matter, some thing). 
2. The Me - This is your physical, material body, the body that continually clamors for comfort, pleasures, food, drink, and for all the toys available in today's materialistic world. Here is the part recognized when you talk about "my arm", "my coiffure", and all that.
3. The Brain - The I tends to be altruistic, and the Me physical and materialistic.

The Brain has to balance the demands of these two, often conflicting, sets of demands. The I says, "I should give a donation to the underprivileged starving children in Darfur." Me says, "That's nonsense. Your donation will go to feed some fat bureaucrat in Washington D.C., not anyone in Darfur. And anyhow, you could use the money yourself for that latest trinket we saw in the department store window" or "I'd rather buy a new hot date or an SUV" ...   well, maybe today a hybrid. It is the conflict between I and Me that causes internal stress; and this is the aspect of stress that can be alleviated by meditation. 

Meditation becomes a very simple and practical matter when you realize that you do not have to sit cross-legged in a canary-yellow robe on a prayer mat chanting "Om". 

The first type of meditation you can practice is what we call active meditation. You are out for a pleasant walk, since even Me will let you go for a walk. Instead of problem solving in your head, take with you some 3 x 5 cards and write down the problems that occur to you, one on each card. Stick them into your pocket. Now, instead of just walking, walk in rhythm. Observe your walking. The old-fashioned fox-trot rhythm is the easiest: Step forward in a normal walk, but in your head sustain a count: slow, slow, quick-quick. Do not hurry. Unlike modern ballroom dancers, you may step out on either foot as your lead foot. The fox-trot police probably are not following you along your route. Such rhythmic walking will engender what is called the relaxation response³, which is nothing more than meditation. 

You may combine this with a couple of tricks to reduce standard (after-the-fact) stress. Every day you drive to work at the same time along the same route and get caught in the same traffic jam. Instead, start a little earlier, park a mile distant from your workplace, and rhythmically walk for the fifteen minutes you will need to get to your destination. Alternatively, you can park as usual and walk around the area where you work.

Meditation of this type will help to reconnect I with Me. You will feel as if a huge weight is being gradually lifted from your shoulders. Many people who have done it talk about feeling as if they've come home.

Let us now move on to the next stage of meditation, the one that you have read about in all the books, the only one which many meditation gurus recommend. This is passive meditation. It is outlined in several of our own books.⁴ Here is an outline of what to do.  

Find a comfortable chair and a timer that runs quietly. All this works best when you turn off all electrical current and appliances around you. You want to be sure that you will not be disturbed for fifteen minutes. This probably means that the kids have gone to bed and your significant other wants to try it with you or is out.

So what do you do? You just sit. If your head goes into a problem-solving mode, write the problem down. This time, put the card into the deep freeze, telling your mind and body, "I'll deal with that after meditating."

To engender the relaxation response, you need to think in terms of a mantra. Choose both a verbal and a multi-sensory mantra. Many people will tell you, "Just imagine a picture"--but some people don't work well with visual impressions. Instead they may hear sounds or detect odors or tastes; or they are very tactile and can clearly imagine the feel of something such as velvet. Most of us have two or three different sensory inputs that rule our lives. 

With something over 90 percent of people the best mantra is indeed vision; but you can augment your work if you combine one or two different senses. Assemble, if you like, a mental bouquet of impressions, a thought for each sense: sight, sound, aroma, touch, taste.

In a typical exercise let's combine a vision of walking along a rippling river with the feel of  the sun on your skin, the sound of birds singing, and the scent of the forest. Mantras naturally fall into two types, which we classify as secular and religious. Table 1 shows secular mantras, and Table 2 religious mantras. Combine these with your own favorite choices in any way that works for you.

Table 1

Secular Mantras

Table 2

Religious Mantras

As you probably well know, the Muslims say don't put any living beings into your mantra. We think this is probably to avoid all those sexual Me reactions--and meditation is not a time for Me with Me's attendant clamor. 

What you are doing here is keeping the left half of the brain busy. You don't have to do it continually. The trick is that when you let the mind free, it may go back to its standard stressful problem-solving mode. As soon as you realize that is happening, go to your mantra. 

Notice we don't suggest that a single magic mantra will work for everyone; nor do we say "Give it three days and you'll be there". You may need a good long while to relax into it, perhaps an entire moon cycle.

All we can say here now is, Try it. You will like it. What will it cost you?
 In the next article we will discuss the protective measures you should take when you meditate passively and openly, trying to get external input.

¹ Sapolsky, Robert "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" pub Freeman
² Selye, Hans "Stress without Distress" pub Signet
³ Benson, Dr. H., and Klipper, M. "The Relaxation Response" pub Avon
⁴ Frost and Frost "Witch's Magical Handbook" pub Reward

Gavin and Yvonne Frost seem to have been around forever. They have written over 30 books, published in five languages, and they are always at the cutting edge of modern occult philosophy. Their School of Wicca* has taught tens of thousands of students both basic meditation and astral travel. For some years they taught pro-active stress management on cruise ships. It is almost impossible to judge fully the impact of these two approachable, controversial, and candid writers and speakers. They are uniquely qualified to speak about an aspect of internal stress and meditation often overlooked. Church and School of Wicca