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

Meditation-Based Relaxation Techniques Produce Brain Wave Patterns Similar to Sleep

By Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs

Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs is an Insomnia Specialist at the Sleep Disorders Center at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and a leading authority on the treatment of insomnia.

As a Senior Scientist at Harvard's Mind/Body Medical Institute and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, where he spent almost 20 years treating and researching insomnia, he developed the first drug-free program for insomnia proven to be more effective than sleeping pills. His insomnia research at Harvard Medical School was funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in journals such as the Archives of Internal Medicine.

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Did you know?

Insomnia now affects over half of all adults.

Meditation and relaxation techniques have been proven to be effective for insomnia.

These techniques improve sleep by producing brain wave patterns that are similar to the early stages of sleep.

Insomnia is becoming increasingly prevalent in our high-stress, fast-paced world. Recent polls by the National Sleep Foundation in the United States found that 35% of adults experience insomnia every night and almost 60% of adults experience insomnia at least a few nights per week. Although prescription and over-the-counter sleep aids are the most common treatments for insomnia, non-drug therapies for insomnia are becoming increasingly popular due to the many side effects of sleep aids and increasing scientific evidence that non-drug treatments are effective for insomnia.

One popular non-drug treatment for insomnia is meditation and relaxation techniques. The use of these techniques for insomnia is based on the fact that individuals who suffer from insomnia exhibit elevated brain arousal that is associated with excessive mental activity during the night. This is often described by insomniacs as "racing thoughts". Researchers have consistently documented this excessive mental arousal as measured by increased fast brain wave patterns called "beta" activity. Beta activity, an alertness brain wave, is elevated both at sleep-onset and during the night, particularly in dream sleep, in insomniacs. This may explain why insomniacs overestimate how long they are awake during the night, since beta activity may alter the usual sense of time. As a result of these findings, insomnia is now conceptualized as a disorder of excessive brain arousal, and interventions designed to reduce insomnia exert their clinical effects by reducing this excessive arousal.

Although meditation and relaxation techniques are widely used to treat a variety of health problems (including hypertension, headaches, anxiety, and irritable bowel syndrome) and have also been used successfully to treat insomnia, it has been presumed that these techniques work by altering brain wave activity and reducing brain arousal. However, few well-controlled studies have actually measured the effects of meditation and relaxation techniques on brain activity.

In a study in the current issue of Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback , Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs and Dr. Richard Friedman measured the effects of meditation-based relaxation techniques on brain wave activity at Harvard Medical School . They compared a group of subjects who practiced a meditation-based relaxation technique daily for 6 weeks to a control group who listened to relaxing music for the same length of time. After six weeks of practice, the researchers measured each group's brain waves while they practiced their mediation-based relaxation or listened to music. Jacobs and Friedman found that the group who practiced the meditation-based relaxation techniques produced greater reductions in brain arousal as measured by increase in theta brain wave activity in multiple brain regions. Theta is a slow brain wave pattern that is produced during the transition from waking to sleep.

Because an increase in theta activity is associated with the onset of sleep, the Jacobs and Friedman study suggest that mediation and relaxation techniques may be similar to the early stage of sleep, called stage 1 sleep. Stage 1 is the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep and is characterized by a gradual transition from a predominant alpha pattern (a "relaxed wakefulness" brain wave) to a predominant theta frequency.

The findings suggest that insomniacs can reduce elevated brain arousal by practicing meditation or relaxation techniques at bedtime or after awakening during the night. By quieting the "racing mind" and excessive mental activity during the night, insomniacs will find it easier to fall asleep at bedtime or during the night.
Source:
http://www.talkaboutsleep.com/sleep-disorders/2005/02/insomnia-meditation-relaxation.htm

The Divine Art of Erasing Age and Creating Vitality (continued ...)

Healthy Blood Is Necessary For Optimum Vitality

The canals in our bodies carry blood plasma that brings nutrition to all the cells, as well as take away the waste products that are dumped by the cells into the bloodstream. Healthy red blood is of utmost important in order to keep well - and plenty of exercise and fresh air.

Many persons do not exercise at all. Working is not really exercise. Of course any physical activity does some good and is better than sedentary life; but if it does not use all the muscles, you are not truly exercising. Scientific exercise means working the entire muscular system. That charges fresh blood into blood vessels in all parts of the body, and as a result it washes away poisons and gives life-force-laden oxygen and food to cells through out the system.

The red blood corpuscles not only carry oxygen, but also life-force, prana, to the cells. Every corpuscle is a tiny battery of life energy. That is what most people don't know. This is why when you loose blood, energy goes. Unless your body is strong, you should never give your blood; it is a mistake to do so. If you are weak, the loss of even one point of blood may injure you in unsuspected ways by lowering your body's overall life energy. If your body is strong, then it is all right to give blood.

The blood is an amazing thing. It knows how to throw off anything it does not like - anything foreign to the health of the body. Being a vehicle of life-force or prana, it carries the subtle intelligence innate in that creative energy. Some of the chemicals in the medicines are not good for you, with t he result that potent tonics are filtered out rather than absorbed by the blood. The blood takes oxygen readily than anything else.That is why proper breathing is so important to keep your blood charged with vitality. You receive more tonic from oxygen than from anything else - especially if you have good habits of proper breathing.

Learn and practice this method: First, throw out the breath with a strong double exhalation (one short and one long breath). Then, inhale in a double inhalation (one short and one long breath), filling the lungs as full as is comfortable. Hold the air in the lungs for a few seconds, allowing the oxygen to be fully absorbed and converted into prana. Then repeat the double exhalation, followed by the double inhalation. Practice this method in fresh air 30 times in the morning and 30 times at night. It is very simple. You will be healthier than ever if you follow this. This exercise brings in a great deal of extra life-force; and also decarbonizes your blood, promoting calmness. Remember that. I (Paramahansa Yogananda) want all of you to be healthy and well.

Eating bananas will help to increase the health of your red blood. They are one of the most beneficial of God's foods. Taking half an avocado daily with your meal will also greatly help in giving you the right nutrition. Your body will feel just as strong as if you had meat - and without creating meat's harmful acid conditions.

The foundation of divine healing is to live naturally. This is just not a physical method of healing; it is a divine method. To maintain health you must use nature's laws. Sun, fresh air, pure water, fruits, and vegetables - all these were given to you by God to keep well.

The Divine Art of Erasing Age and Creating Vitality (continued ...)

Cleansing The Body From Within

Health is easy to maintain if you know and practice the laws of keeping the body well, rather than starting the effort to heal yourself only after you become sick.

The first step is to get rid of the poisons that have accumulated in the system.Fasting is an ideal method of accomplishing this - for example, three days on Orange juice and ground almonds, with natural laxative. Repeat this after one month. If you spend time and effort necessary to cleanse the body from within, you will quickly find the truth of what I (Paramahansa Yogananda) am telling you about preserving youth.

Most of you are dying of disease because of overeating day after day, and eating the wrong foods. The less meat you eat the better - especially after you turn forty, because it takes much energy to clean your own blood as well as what you ingest from the animal's, which may carry many toxins or harmful chemicals. Meat has some good qualities, but it is better to eat meat substitutes. Meat takes too long to digest and pass through the body; that undigested protein creates an acid condition in the body that is destructive to kidneys. Many persons have kidney trouble and do not know it; yet the impaired function of these purifying filters inevitably hasten old age. Fruits and vegetables,including raw salads of lettuce and other greens, help to counter act harmful acid-forming foods - as well as aiding elimination.

Make it a habit to eat more fruit. It is made for you by God. It is packed with energy and healing power. You will not have constipation, which is one of the worst enemies of health; and your body will not look haggard. Fruits have definite effect on the mind. Vibrationally, fresh fruits in the diet help to produce spirituality, even more than vegetables. An abundance of fruit will make your mind much more clear and calm. Watermelon, for example, is helpful for those who are cranky. More fruits and vegetables will get rid of whatever headaches and pains and cranky dispositions come because of eating too much meat. Of course, these conditions may also be caused by other factors; but the point is, to remain youthfulness and calmness in body and mind, you should eat those foods that lessen and remove the accumulation of toxins in the body.

Another point is to change the type of meal you take at night. It is best to take the heavier meal at noon, not late in the day. In particular, drop the habit of eating much protein at night. Instead, have more fruits or light vegetable dishes for the evening meal.

(to be continued in next post)

The Divine Art of Erasing Age and Creating Vitality

From " Self-Realization Fellowship Magazine"
A magazine devoted to healing of body, mind and soul

Article by Sri Paramahansa Yogananda

" Cultivating pure love and true wisdom greatly enlivens the heart and brain - physically as well as spiritually. And the harmonization of the Love Principle in the heart and the Wisdom Principle in the brain creates a magnetic force that draws healing energy into the whole body."

To remain in abundant good health is an art that is not known by most people. There are two aspects to this art: the physical methods and the divine methods. The physical ways of looking after the body-machine are numerous; countless books have been written on the subject. Still, that knowledge alone is of limited effectiveness in keeping this machine in perfect condition. We must also know how to apply the divine ways in order to keep ourselves well.

The joy and vitality of youth are not related to one's physical age. God is ever youthful, and He is eternal. But, in the general sense we can say youth is with us until about the age of thirty. After forty, the body-machine begins to change; its natural endowment of vitality and ability to restore itself starts to wane. You can choose to be either the body's doctor or its enemy. To the degree that you can avoid inflicting damage on your body-machine, you can hope to preserve it much longer in a healthy condition. By the right physical, mental and spiritual methods, much of the unwelcome effect of the body's aging can be erased.

(to be continued -
please read the next post to know the methods to erase age and create vitality) :)