Atlanta Constitution, January 11, 2000

HEALTH
Relax your ills away: Meditation brings not just peace of mind, but better health

When Morehouse School of Medicine professor Kofi Kondwani closes his eyes, the scientific study begins.

"Think of the mantra and then we'll continue meditating for 20 minutes," he quietly tells eight people sitting around a boardroom table in a downtown Atlanta corner office. Lights dimmed, the group closes their eyes on cue.

Next comes lots of nothing.

Only outside the wraparound windows does the day drone on. Eight floors below, headlights stream down John Wesley Dobbs Avenue toward highways and headaches.

Around the table, heads grow heavy as if a huge snorefest is on the meeting's agenda. No one is sleeping. But they are resting --- deeply --- while practicing transcendental meditation, based on an ancient ritual of India. At the same time, they're contributing to the expanding evidence of physical, mental and emotional benefits of TM. So far, those benefits include reduced anxiety, increased productivity and creativity, reduced hospitalization, decreased stress and a slowdown of the aging process in longtime meditators.

The participants learned the art of this type of meditation in eight hours taught during four consecutive days, the structured program brought to the United States 40 years ago by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa.

"It's a simple procedure done twice daily for 20 minutes at a time," explains Kondwani, one of a handful of African-American TM instructors and possibly the only professor of meditation on the staff of an American medical school. "You sit with your eyes closed and learn to meditate using a sound that's inaudible. It's a sound with no meaning that the teacher gives each individual. It quiets the mind down. Your mind gets down to one thought, and then that thought is tuned out, and then. . . ."

You know the rest --- nothing.

After 10 minutes, Kondwani's group --- a teacher, a bus driver, a government employee or two, a construction supervisor, mothers, fathers and grandmothers --- falls into a deep rest, sitting up, that may be more beneficial than the one they take nightly in a horizontal position. Research has proven that during TM, a person's heart rate and oxygen consumption decrease more than when he's asleep.

But what this group wants to see is a decline in dangerously elevated blood pressure. Aside from being black, hypertension was the other trait they shared before they learned how to close their eyes and reach a state of consciousness dubbed "restful alertness."

The group is part of a $1 million, four-year study funded by the National Institutes of Health to look at reducing hypertension in older black men and women using nonmedical treatments: TM, anger management classes or a program of diet and health education.

Morehouse is also conducting two other studies involving TM and heart disease among African-Americans. The studies are overseen by the Behavioral Medicine Research Center, directed by Charlie Lollis, a Ph.D psychology researcher, and Dr. Elizabeth Ofili, chief cardiologist.

So far, anecdotal testimony from the Morehouse-NIH study points to TM's being more effective than the other two strategies. Previous studies found it as effective as antihypertensive drugs in lowering blood pressure.

"It's the best thing that ever happened to me," says Lenina King, 43, of Lithonia, who joined the Morehouse study last April. "I've had high blood pressure for five years, and I've been on so many different medications to try and lower it, but only meditation finally did. I went from 170 over 110 to 120 over 80. It's really calmed me down."

Larry Taylor, 52, who plays drums and who teaches music in Atlanta schools, says he was disappointed at first that he wasn't assigned to the health education and diet part of the study, because he doubted that meditation would help. "I really didn't think it would work, but I know it's helping me out now. It's sort of like floating on a wave, the patience it delivers and ability to cope with things.

"I look at it as an art form. Once you learn it, you really want to practice it. It doesn't mess with your religion and it doesn't require nothing. And you gain so much. . . . It really pays off."

For Taylor, the payoff was a drop in blood pressure from 170/110 to 130/77, accomplished even when he stopped his medication.

[Continues on page 2]

[Back to top]

Reprinted with permission from The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution. Further reproduction, retransmission or distribution of these materials without the prior written consent of The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution, and any copyright holder identified in the material's copyright notice, is prohibited.