Transcendental Meditation healing negative effects associated with PTSD
by Global Good News staff writer

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22 November 2011

Dr Fred Travis, Director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness, and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management, recently returned from a nationwide lecture tour across Germany. While there, he spoke in nine different cities, including Lübeck, where he talked about the benefits of using Transcendental Meditation to treat psychiatric patients.

Dr Travis gave a talk to the psychiatric clinicians at a university training hospital. His talk was entitled 'What's in EEG and MRI During Meditation Practice and How It can be Used for Psychiatric Patients.'

He primarily focused on how stress and fatigue negatively affect the brain. From the opposite angle, he also talked about how the Transcendental Meditation Technique can benefit individuals suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

When Dr Travis mentioned to the audience of clinicians and physicians that people with PTSD are able to meditate and receive great benefit from doing so, this brought up many thoughtful, pointed questions.

The audience wanted to know, Don't the patients have flashbacks? Don't they have strong negative moods that they can't deal with? These results happen a lot with the psychotherapy the clinicians are currently using, so they were naturally curious to see if Transcendental Meditation was different.

'It really intrigued them that as a traumatic experience could turn on the amygdala, turn on all of the symptoms of PTSD,' Dr Travis remarked, 'so transcending could turn it off, could reset the firing of the brain.'

He has seen this positive result many times, Dr Travis said. He's seen people with severe PTSD practise Transcendental Meditation twice a day for a few days 'and their whole symptomatology is reduced in a major way'.

He continued, 'I can really see the power of the mind settling to the transcendent* and so the body is reset in a more positive way.'

The mention of treating PTSD led to a very good discussion, and also to a recommendation for the clinicians from Dr Travis.

'In all of the places I talked, I kept on calling for collaborative research. I said that meditation is a new scientific tool; it's a tool which needs to be used.'

He also told the audience, 'Now doctors should consider prescribing experiences, such as meditation.'

The clinicians and physicians at the hospital in Lübeck agreed completely with Dr Travis.

'They said, right now we use talk therapy and we use drugs. Behavioral therapy, because experience changes the brain, is something we need to incorporate. We need to understand meditation experiences.'

* The field of transcendental consciousness, the silent, unbounded field of pure intelligence at the basis of all the mind's activity.

Related articles:
∙ Universities across Germany welcome brain research expert Dr Fred Travis
∙ Germany: Dr Fred Travis speaks at Münster University about creativity and the brain
∙ Germany: University students learn about 'brain, research, and yoga'

Global Good News will continue to report on Dr Travis's tour.

© Copyright 2011 Global Good News^®

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