Seven Reasons Why We May Live Longer

Studies shows that people who have a spiritual practice tend to live longer, recover faster from illness, and experience less distress in the face of calamity. In a recent well-researched and thoughtful book, God, Faith, and Health: Exploring the Spirituality-Healing Connections(John Wiley & Sons, 2001), epidemiologist Jeff Levin, Ph.D., has laid out seven pathways by which "religious or spiritual affiliation" may lead to better health.

1. Healthy lifestyle and social support
There is evidence that religious people may live longer because they are better stewards of their bodies. For example, many religious teachings discourage the consumption of alcohol, tobacco, meat, and drugs, all of which can endanger health. Religious people also tend to have more friends and stronger community. Social support is known to contribute to health.

2. Spiritual Practice
Practices such as prayer and meditation have been shown to improve health by promoting physiologic relaxation and strengthening the immune system.

3. Personality
Many religions prescribe attitudes and ways of relating to others that promote health. For example, most religions teach forgiveness, compassion, and peaceful comportment, which directly promote health. Practitioners who release anger and forgive or be helpful are likely to have decreased blood pressure, increased immune function.

4. Cognitive style
Religions teach faith, hope, and optimism, all of which are associated with better medical outcomes.

5. Mystical experience
Mystical experiences may occur with spiritual practices such as prolonged prayer, chanting or meditation These experiences may activate bio energy or life force that promotes natural, innate healing.

6. Supernatural force or intervention
There is a principle that is neither physical, emotional, nor mental, which is, nevertheless, the source of our aliveness and experience. Whatever this force might be, mounting evidence from studies at Duke, Columbia, the Mid-America Heart Institute suggests that an efficacy to healing intention or prayer separate from healthy lifestyle, social support, personality, spiritual practice, cognitive style or even altered states. Thus one way spirituality heals - is spiritual.

"During the past thirty years, people from all civilized countries on earth have consulted me. Among all my patients in the second of half of life - that is to say, over thirty-five - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that even one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook." - Carl Jung

Source: Self-Realization Fellowship Magazine, Winter 2002

Prescription for Health : All You Need Is "Love"

Research Shows Expressing Love Is Crucial To Your Health

Imagine getting a prescription that reads: "100 milligrams of love, twice daily, unlimited renewals." Caring, of course can't be put in a capsule, but can heal as powerfully as medicine. "Love is a basic human need," says Dean Ornish, M.D., author of Love and Survival: 8 Pathways to Intimacy and Health."When we don't get it, we pay a price in how long we live and how likely we are to get sick."

We may also pay a price if we don't give love. According to Stephen Post, Ph.D., professor of bioethics and religion at Ohio's Case Western University, research shows that loving acts neutralize the kind of negative emotions that adversely affect immune, endocrine, and cardiovascular function.

But beyond our need to get and give it, what is love? How do we define something as essential and invisible as air? Researchers often look at human connection as the cardinal signal of love.

Scientists have taken the study of love in new directions, examining everything from the impact of mother's smile on her baby to the healing power of hugs. An interesting discovery has been how many kinds of connections count. Ties to friends, family, work, neighbours, and community can bolster health and happiness.

Beyond Romance
A powerful shift is occurring in the understanding of love, declares Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize winning science writer and author of Love at Goon Parle:Harry Hallow and the Science of Affection. " The science of today puts kindness ahead of romance," she says. The field of psychology ha shifted from Freud and sexuality to an adult view of love as responsibility and caring. The message is very clear: Taking care of each other is the nature of love."

Giving love allows you to ascertain who you are. "I define love as the un-sought for discovery of self through giving," Post says. He sees love as our indestructible core, an insight he confirmed when he began to work with Alzheimer's sufferers. " People with cognitive deficits are incredibly sensitive to affection. Any person can respond profoundly to love."

Post recalls one Alzheimer's patient who handed him a twig with a big smile. "If love was a wind, you'd have been blown off by your chair by the love in his eyes." he says.

Extend and Connect

So how do we "self-medicate" with love?

You can begin with a simple exercise in awareness: Choose a neutral person in your world, perhaps someone who sells you a morning coffee, and think of that person with compassion. "This practice awakens feelings of resonance and joy, which actually changes your biology (by releasing the chemical dopamine the brain)," says Sally Severino, M.D., professor of psychiatrhy ay University of New Mexico.

Move on to visualizing those closest to you with compassion. "The key is to cultivate a feeling of joy when you connect to others," says University of California psychiatrist Jeffery Schwartz, M.D. His brain-imaging studies have shown that compassionate practices stabilizes and balances brain functions, sometimes as effectively as medications such as antidepressants.

Finally, remember that love takes many forms, and that connection is more than romantic love. Expand your circle of love into a friendship toward all living things.

"I used to feel loved because i thought I was special," says Ornish. "Now I feel special because I am loved and I can love."
Your Rx (prescription) for Love

Your Rx For Love

Here are some simple actions to bring more love into your life.

1. Do small things with great kindness
2. Volunteer
3. Touch and be touched

4. Avoid rudeness

5. Love and do what you will

"If you get into a state of love, no matter what you do , it's going to be good." - St. Augustine

Source: Self-Realization Magazine, Issue: Summer 2008

Can Meditation affect Your Health @ the Genetic Level?

DNA (DeoxyriboNucleic Acid)

Say "Om": Doctors Find Meditation Affects Your Body
A Preliminary Study Shows Meditating Turns off Stress-Related Genes

It turns out peaceful thoughts really can influence our bodies, right down to the instructions we receive from our DNA, according to a new study.

Researchers for the study, published in the Public Library of Science, took blood samples from a group of 19 people who habitually meditated or prayed for years, and 19 others who never meditated.The researchers ran genomic analyses of the blood and found that the meditating group suppressed more than twice the number of stress-related genes -- about 1,000 of them -- than the nonmeditating group.

The more these stress-related genes are expressed, the more the body will have a stress response like high blood pressure or inflammation. Over long periods of time, these stress responses can worsen high blood pressure, pain syndromes and other conditions.

The nonmeditating group then spent 10 minutes a day for eight weeks training in relaxation techniques that involved repeating a prayer, thought, sound, phrase or movement.

"What this does is to break the train of everyday thought -- you no longer have stressful thoughts and because of that the body is able to return to a healthy state," said Dr. Herbert Benson, director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute Mind/Body Medicine and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

By the end of the training, the novice meditating group was also suppressing stress-related genes, although at lower levels than those of the long-term meditating people.

Meditation in the Genes

"In the old days, we thought the mind didn't affect the body," Benson said. "In truth, it's breaking down the very old rule."

Indeed, fellow mind-body researchers are finding more evidence that meditation and spiritual practices can influence the body in elemental ways.

Dr. Dean Ornish, professor of medicine and founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute at the University of California at San Francisco, recently found a relationship between meditation and genes in prostate cancer.

"This is an important pilot study showing that meditation alone may favorably alter gene expression in whole blood," Ornish said. "These findings provide additional evidence to our recent study in PNAS [the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] showing that meditation -- when combined with better nutrition and moderate exercise -- also favorably altered gene expression in prostate tissue."

But researchers warn that only preliminary steps have been taken toward establishing a connection between genes and meditation.

"It's on the limits of sensitivity of where we can go on genomics and proteomics," said Towia Libermann, co-author of the study and director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Genomics Center in Boston. "We can't go into the brain itself, so a lot of what we do is going on in the blood."

That difficult step from brain to blood can make research to link meditation and genetics difficult.
"Things happen, and genes get turned on or turned off -- the genes make RNA, then the RNA makes proteins," said Dr. Charles Raison, clinical director of the Mind Body Program in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University in Atlanta.

Raison said it is those final proteins in the process that have a significant effect on the body, and sometimes RNA doesn't end up making those proteins. Since genomic analysis measures only the RNA in the blood, it can't guarantee that RNA had a specific effect on the body.

"Not everything gets down to the business end of the gun," said Raison, who would also have liked to see more definition of what meditation means in the study as opposed to including any forms of repetitive prayer or yoga.

Sorce:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=5287805&page=1

http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes/archive/2008/7/1.aspx