Christian Meditation Center

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  • Researcher hopes findings signal new treatment option amid surge in mental health cases

    Legacy Article

    This article was carried forward from the legacy Christian Meditation Center site so older ministry reflections remain available here.

    Alvin Powell, Harvard Staff Writer

    February 1, 2023

    Amanda Baker was part of a research team that studied the effectiveness of mindfulness-based stress reduction.

    Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

    Research has shown that the U.S. is facing a mental health crisis, with specialists unable to keep pace with a surge in cases during the pandemic. Amanda Baker, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and director of Mass General’s Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders, recently worked with colleagues from New York University and Georgetown to examine one potential response: mindfulness-based stress reduction. The team compared the effectiveness of the intensive intervention with that of the commonly prescribed anxiety drug escitalopram. Participants in the study improved about the same amount after an eight-week course. We spoke with Baker about the research and its implications for treatment of mental health issues. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

    Q&A

    Amanda Baker

    GAZETTE: How prevalent is anxiety disorder?

    BAKER: Anxiety disorders are extremely prevalent. Depending upon the estimate, between 2 percent and 10 percent of the population experiences specific types of anxiety disorders, with 20 percent of the population having any current anxiety disorder diagnosis and nearly a third of the U.S. population experiencing significant anxiety in their lives.

    GAZETTE: What treatments do we have for it?

    BAKER: We have gold-standard treatments that have been through rigorous studies, both on the medication side — mostly SSRI-type medications — and the therapy side, with things like cognitive behavioral therapy. But there’s a real press on providers these days and those things are hard to gain access to and becoming harder and harder. Symptoms of anxiety and depression increased during the pandemic. Where we would have seen significant symptoms in 30 percent of folks, we’re now seeing them in 40 percent. We’re also getting recommendations to do more screening for depression and anxiety, which is great, but that means there are even more folks screening positive and needing care.

    This study came out of all of these pieces. We need more treatments and we need to evaluate whether our treatments are as good as these gold-standard treatments. One area that’s gained a lot of attention is meditation and mindfulness. Some studies have shown that 15 percent of the population has at least dabbled with mindfulness or meditation, and it has been gaining popularity. The approach that we used in the study is mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), which is a specific eight-week intervention.

    GAZETTE: What is MBSR?

    BAKER: It was developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at UMass and it’s taken off. It’s an eight-week course, with 2½ hours a week, plus 45 minutes of daily mindfulness homework prescribed — not that everyone does the prescribed amount — and a six-hour retreat at one point within those eight weeks. So, it’s a heavy dose of mindfulness, but it can be rigorously studied and compared to other standard treatments that follow a similar-ish regimen. That includes medication, which often takes about eight weeks to take effect. In this case, we compared escitalopram, the generic of Lexapro, to MBSR.

    GAZETTE: What about subclinical anxiety — is that part of this picture as well?

    BAKER: It is. A lot of folks experience symptoms of anxiety that don’t necessarily cross the threshold into being a diagnosable anxiety disorder. When something is in what we call a disorder category, it causes a significant amount of distress in daily life and interferes with daily activities: work, socializing, school. But a good chunk of the population experiences anxiety symptoms that might not cross the threshold of interfering with their lives. They’re still able to manage and get things done, but perhaps it’s causing a lot of distress.

    GAZETTE: What did you find in the study?

    BAKER: We wanted to look at whether MBSR is non-inferior to this gold-standard escitalopram medication. And that’s what the findings show. Clinically, both groups started at what we call a moderate-to-marked — like a moderate-plus — level of anxiety. They decreased to a mild, almost subclinical, level of anxiety. Both groups saw more than a one point drop in our primary outcome measure, a clinically significant amount of change.

    GAZETTE: How relevant is this to what you do at the clinic? Is this testing two things that you do all the time?

    BAKER: Our prescribers prescribe escitalopram every day, but we don’t provide MBSR in our program because it’s not commonly reimbursed by insurances. So, this is a service that most people have to pay for out of pocket and find a place that’s providing it. One of the benefits of MBSR is that you don’t have to have a clinical degree to be trained in it so many more providers can be trained and deliver this intervention. We hope that this study provides the evidence so insurance companies will reimburse for MBSR, such that we can provide it in our clinic.

    GAZETTE: Is this seen as a potential tool for answering unmet mental health needs?

    BAKER: Absolutely, but I think more work is needed. This was a rigorous dose of the treatment and it was all in person. We need to know if it’s successful if it is delivered online live, if it is asynchronous, if it is on an app. There are lots of remaining questions. But the findings definitely provide evidence for another option. Right now, we’re strapped in providing what we know is empirically supported. MBSR is another option and opens the door for — hopefully — other mindfulness-based interventions.

    GAZETTE: What symptoms should a person look for if they have a sense that they might have a problem?

    BAKER: The symptoms are going to differ from one person to the next. For some, there might be physical symptoms: racing heart, sweating, trouble breathing. For others, there might be thoughts or cognitive symptoms, worries — perhaps about the future or ruminations on the past. And then for others, it’s emotional, with a lot of feelings. It takes many different forms — panic, distress — but the question is: Are any of the symptoms highly distressing and interfering with our daily lives? If so, reach out and speak to your primary care doctor or a mental health professional.

    Article found in the Harvard Gazette

  • ‘The Wandering Mind’ Review: The Demon of Distraction

    Legacy Article

    This article was carried forward from the legacy Christian Meditation Center site so older ministry reflections remain available here.

    ‘The Wandering Mind’ Review: The Demon of Distraction

    Even without phones or screens, medieval monks found it hard to stay focused on the divine.

    The Wandering Mind’ Review: The Demon of Distraction

    Even without phones or screens, medieval monks found it hard to stay focused on the divine.

    The devil attacks monk from behind in a detail from ‘De Similitudinibus,’ ca. 13th century. PHOTO: BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

    By Dominic Green

    Jan. 20, 2023 11:40 am ET

    We are distracted. When we look back from our frantic present, the past seems like a place where we could hear ourselves think. In “The Wandering Mind,” Jamie Kreiner observes that the modern-day distraction epidemic has revived our interest in medieval monks, “those supposed paragons of concentration,” as masters of self-control and calm.

    Slavery and the American Revolution, notes of a social climber, monastic distractions, a French thriller and more.

    Their time, Late Antiquity (roughly A.D. 300 to 900), resembles ours: Society is in a state of flux and “it feels like things are declining rapidly.” Our ethical qualms about distraction, Ms. Kreiner argues, are a monastic legacy, because it was the monks who cast distraction as a “moral crisis” in the first place. The ostensibly secular West, she writes, carries “a set of cultural values surrounding cognition that are very specifically monastic and, to an extent, specifically Christian.”

    In Hellenistic and Stoic thought, “attentiveness” to mental processes leads to self-control. Distraction (perispasmos) is external and keeps us from doing philosophy. For the early monks who inherited this legacy, distraction was an original sin of the mind, and the war to concentrate was a “primordial struggle” against “demonic antagonism.” The divided attention reflected a divided self, cut off from God. Gossip and concern with other people’s business led the mind astray. For Plutarch, writing in the first century A.D., “nosiness” harms society by making us rude and unproductive. The 4th-century monk John Cassian held that curiositas is immoral because it makes us inwardly “dissatisfied and incapacitated.” The modern morality of attention, Ms. Kreiner suggests, fluctuates between these views.

    The monastic ideal was to “unplug” completely and permanently, to renounce the body and become pure spirit. The monks’ “cosmic contemplations” were “the centerpiece of a cognitive program aimed at total concentration on the divine.” Early Christian desert fathers like St. Simeon Stylites sought this in solitude, only to become “tourist attractions” harassed by visitors, and so the solitary ideal retreated behind the walls of the monastery.

    Peter Brown, the godfather of studies in Late Antiquity, has shown that while the monastery was a laboratory for prayer, prayer was not the monks’ only labor. The praying individual sought to ascend the vertical axis to the heavens, and escape the horizontal axis of material life. But this withdrawal generated insights that society needed and intercessory prayers that it valued. It endowed monks, as Ms. Kreiner writes, with “neutrality as negotiators and advisers.” This mixture of worldly and spiritual services encouraged rich patrons to support the monks in return. Between the 4th and 8th centuries, Christians donated “about one-third of the real estate within the current and former Roman Empire” to monasteries and churches.

    Beset by temptation within and business without, the monks developed strategies for creating the mens intenta, or “purposeful mind.” The modern pursuit of “wellness” through “self-care” and exotic pampering was not what they had in mind. They were consciously “counter-cultural,” and the culture they countered was late Roman: orgiastic dining; frequent exercise and bathing; and the latest male styles, long hair with pants, tunic and cloak.

    Instead of cultivating the body as “an instrument of spiritual health,” the monks punished it, quieting its impulses to clear their minds. In washing the body, Ephrem the Syrian declared, “the soul becomes polluted.” Rather than following the barbarian-influenced fashion for long hair, monks tonsured their hair to look “manly” in their own way. Wandering minds could lead to wandering hands, and the wrong kind of horizontal activities. The goal was to become a spiritual “eunuch,” but the biggest challenge to self-control, Ms. Kreiner writes, was not desire, but hunger.

    John Cassian called eating “the first in a series of Olympic events” in which the monks competed against themselves. The heroes of competitive fasting included Rusticula, who ate only every third day, and Portianus, who “purposefully made himself thirsty by chewing on salt in summertime.” There was also the nameless elder who, when he craved a small cucumber, chastened himself by hanging it on the wall as an object of contemplation.

    With the body silenced, the mind was free to meditate, but also to digress in mysterious ways. Unlike today’s cognitive elite, the monks were not “technological optimists.” Books were a necessary evil, error-prone substitutions for memory and the “pedagogical gold standard of the ancient world,” face-to-face learning. The “confessional competition” to amass copies and translations helped to preserve pagan texts, often in Christianized form, but it also led to a low-tech “information overload.”

    The monks navigated the textual seas with mnemonic devices and other visual cues. Eusebius, whose “universal history” was both part of the overload and an attempt to synthesize ancient accounts into manageable form, devised canon tables, illustrated grids comparing the Gospels. If the wandering eye looked up, the beauties of church art directed it back to its studies.

    As the monk’s mind edged closer to God, even the protective routines of the monastic life could become distracting. Intense focus could itself resemble its enemy: “one form of mental drunkenness . . . mistaken for the other.” The monks’ mental architecture was continually “tottering, falling, slipping, collapsing,” the “demon of distraction” always waiting.

    We can recognize the wages of contemporary distraction in the monks’ struggle; the “handicap of being human” is perennial. The monks might also recognize their time in ours. On the horizontal axis, society fulfills Marshall McLuhan’s grim predictions: growing illiteracy and entertainment by bright images. On the vertical axis, a small elite of “knowledge workers” aspires to overcome human physicality through transhumanism, rather than spiritual transcendence. “The Wandering Mind” focuses on more than the past, and its implications demand our attention.

    Mr. Green is a Journal contributor. His latest book is “The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898.”

    Appeared in the January 21, 2023, print edition as ‘The Demon of Distraction’.

  • Presence

    Legacy Article

    This article was carried forward from the legacy Christian Meditation Center site so older ministry reflections remain available here.

    Have you ever seen lovers gaze into each other’s eyes,

    or sit silently, looking out over the ocean?

    No words are necessary.

    In fact, they just seem to get in the way.

    As love draws us deeper into the oneness of our hearts,

    our two hearts begin to beat as one

    as we breathe together. So it is with old friends.

    Just their mere presence means everything to us.

    Everything else is lost in the moment we’re together.

    It’s like this with silence. As we enter and dwell together with God, no words are necessary.

    Our hearts begin to beat as one.

    Our spirits mingle in a mutual dwelling of God

    in us and us in God.

    This is what restoration is all about…

    God’s restoring our original intent,

    the profound mystery of wholeness, oneness,

    the unity of belonging, presence, and rest.

    We are like lovers and old friends

    who yearn to sit and dwell with the Holy One

    in this vast mystery of eternity.

    Enter in, Come cross the threshold

    Come, let us enter in.

    ~ Bob Holmes

  • The Practice of Presence

    Legacy Article

    This article was carried forward from the legacy Christian Meditation Center site so older ministry reflections remain available here.

    For in Him we live and move and have our being.[i]

     

    The Practice of Presence

    by Teresa Yerkes

    We experience the Presence of God when we turn our attention to God. He is everywhere!  The only way to miss Him is to hide from Him or forget to bring Him along. There are any number of ways to experience his presence, including: praying, reading your Bible, singing, and journaling, to name a few.  This is a very short list. You can find Him in any activity you are doing, as long as you are choosing to allow Him to join you.  Most of us feel comfortable and understand His desire to meet with us in the outward circumstances of our daily life.  But for some of us, we find it more difficult to understand that He is also interested in participating in our inner life. This chapter is devoted to His presence within us. We know He resides there because Jesus told us, “Nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.”[ii]

    Paul in his letter to the Church in Corinth was aware of this truth when he posed this question, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”[iii] And we find Jesus comforting the disciples before He ascended into heaven saying, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”[iv] One last scripture I will share, one where Paul affirms His presence within us, “Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.”[v] These scriptures also show us another amazing truth, not just God, but Christ and the Holy Spirit are within us too.  What treasures we possess!

    So, if the Holy Three live within us, why are we not like them?  It seems we should have our act together a little more than we do. I remember reading Galatians, Chapter 5, wanting so much to understand how in the world to walk by the Spirit.  Let’s read it together:

    You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.  For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.

    So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.[vi]

    So, there it is in verse 16, “walk by the Spirit.”  The King James version translates this as “walk in the Spirit.”  Frankly, the translation didn’t matter, I was unable to do either.  I read several books to try to figure it out, but they didn’t help, or I wasn’t able to understand what I was supposed to do.  Either way I was not doing it and found myself repeating patterns that were no longer serving my best interests.  As I shared earlier, there was a list of poor lifestyle choices I was involved in, like smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, didn’t eat right, didn’t exercise…do I have to say more?  It’s enough to say, there was a lot of house cleaning to be done.

    There is also the teaching from Jesus, “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.”[vii] Sounds like a lovely place to be, abiding in Christ.  But how is it possible?  How can I sense myself abiding in Christ throughout the day? Occasionally, I would sense Him with me, but abiding sounds like we are to be so close all the time.

    For many years, the ability to walk in the Spirit and abide in Christ were out of reach for me.  It wasn’t until I started practicing Christian meditation that it dawned on me to walk in the Spirit and to abide in Christ was directly related to how I was living out my life.  Up until then, I was living my life through thoughts.  So, some of my thoughts were not based on truth and this led to many errors in judgment. My focus was based primarily on what information my mind was feeding me through the day.  Relying on my thoughts attached to misaligned emotions was not a stable way to run my life.

    Christian meditation, on the other hand, changes the focus away from your thoughts onto the Center of your being—the Kingdom of God.  When we are consistently living from our Source, we are more grounded and more likely to make good decisions. Spending time in the Kingdom stabilizes our emotions, quiets us to hear from God and opens us to so many possibilities that we couldn’t imagine for ourselves. As I emphasized earlier, the challenge is we have been oriented our entire lives to live only from our thoughts.  We have allowed them to rule us.  So, it will take some time before we are able to manage our lives from the Center of our being.  I noticed this for myself as I continued to meditate.  I noticed I was living more from my Center and this new focus had a positive influence on my thoughts and behaviors.

    Once I was armed with this knowledge, it all started to make sense to me.  If I want to walk in the Spirit, I need to spend time where the Spirit is—in the center of my being.

     

    An excerpt in Teresa Yerkes’ book, Christian Meditation: The Practice of Christian Meditation

    [i] Acts 17:28a

    [ii]  Luke 17:21 KJV

    [iii] 1 Corinthians 3:16

    [iv] Matthew 28:20

    [v] Col. 3:11 NIV

    [vi] Gal 5:13-18

    [vii] John 15:4