On Stress, Yoga Meditation, and The Evolution Revolution

In the Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dick­ens wrote:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wis­dom, it was the age of fool­ish­ness…. It was the sea­son of light, it was the sea­son of dark­ness. It was the spring of hope, it was the win­ter of despair”

Yes, the peri­od of which Dick­ens wrote is a lot like the present day.

We are liv­ing through extra­or­di­nary times in a com­pli­cat­ed world. In my 74 ½ years, I’ve nev­er seen any­thing like it — from the virus to polit­i­cal strife to protests, stress is rampant.

Stress may impact neg­a­tive­ly vir­tu­al­ly every sys­tem of our body, from the immune sys­tem lead­ing to decreased resis­tance to virus infec­tions, such as Covid-19 and can­cer, to heart prob­lems, ele­vat­ed blood pres­sure, autoim­mune dis­ease, and more.

Chron­ic stress has also been revealed to impact men­tal health lead­ing to high lev­els of anx­i­ety, depres­sion, and insom­nia. More­over, stress in and of itself is a risk fac­tor for low­er cog­ni­tive abil­i­ty. Peo­ple who report high lev­els of stress, includ­ing adverse child­hood expe­ri­ences and ear­ly life stress such as trau­ma, abuse, or neglect, have a much high­er risk of devel­op­ing this fatal, mind-rob­bing disease.

Stress also has a pro­nounced neg­a­tive effect on your genes, decreas­ing the lev­el of a cru­cial enzyme called telom­erase, which con­trols the length of your telom­ere at the tip of your DNA. While short­er telom­eres are asso­ci­at­ed with poor immune sys­tem func­tion, inflam­ma­tion, accel­er­at­ed aging, and Alzheimer’s, longer telom­eres equal a longer life with a clear mind.

Calm Your Mind, Create Better Health

The mod­ern sci­ence of stress began in 1949, when Dr. Wal­ter Hess, a Swiss phys­i­ol­o­gist, won the Nobel Prize for his work reveal­ing two spots in the hypo­thal­a­mus of the brain, often called the brain’s brain. One spot is the stress cen­ter while the oth­er is the anti-stress cen­ter, which was fur­ther delin­eat­ed by Her­bert Ben­son, M.D. twen­ty-five years lat­er. Ben­son coined the phrase, The Relax­ation Response, to describe the anti-stress effects of med­i­ta­tion. Benson’s work reveals that med­i­ta­tion has a mul­ti­tude of health-pro­mot­ing benefits.

Beyond the sim­ple Relax­ation Response pop­u­lar­ized by Ben­son, oth­er basic med­i­ta­tion tech­niques such as Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion ™, Mind­ful­ness Based Stress Reduc­tion (MBSR) and so-called yoga med­i­ta­tion Kir­tan Kriya (KK) — which can even affect pos­i­tive­ly the pre­ven­tion or rever­sal of mem­o­ry loss. The beau­ty of Kir­tan Kriya is that while TM and MBSR require exten­sive train­ing and a long dai­ly time com­mit­ment, Kir­tan Kriya takes only 12 min­utes once a day.

The Benefits of Yoga Meditation

This chart sum­ma­rizes the many proven ben­e­fits of KK, all of which are crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant to boost immune and brain func­tion today. Enhanced brain func­tion leads to a bet­ter immune response as well. It’s also impor­tant to note that KK increas­es telom­erase by 43 per­cent, and also actu­al­ly increas­es telom­ere length.

In addi­tion to the many phys­i­cal health ben­e­fits, the prac­tice sup­ports the cul­ti­va­tion of high­er lev­els of psy­cho­log­i­cal well-being (PWB):

1. Accep­tance: You accept life as it is and peo­ple as they are and make the best of it. You change what you can and per­haps drop what you can’t.

2. Self- esteem or self- effi­ca­cy: The deep knowl­edge that what you do makes a dif­fer­ence in your health and well-being.

3. Inde­pen­dence: You live free from the influ­ence of oth­ers’ neg­a­tive thoughts towards you. You are your own per­son, com­fort­able in your own skin. You also look for­ward to liv­ing inde­pen­dent­ly in your own home for as long as possible.

4. Per­sis­tent per­son­al growth: The desire and abil­i­ty and con­tin­ued prac­tice of good, health-pro­mot­ing behav­iors, such as a good diet includ­ing sup­ple­men­ta­tion, stress man­age­ment, espe­cial­ly through yoga and med­i­ta­tion, and reg­u­lar phys­i­cal and men­tal exercise.

5. Pos­i­tive rela­tion­ships: Called a san­gat in East­ern heal­ing phi­los­o­phy or being with like- mind­ed peo­ple with whom you share love and sup­port. While this may be a chal­lenge dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, tech­nol­o­gy helps you reach out to fam­i­ly and friends.

6. Pur­pose or mis­sion: Dis­cov­er­ing your own pur­pose or mis­sion in life has by itself been shown to reduce Alzheimer’s risk. For­tu­nate­ly, prac­tic­ing KK reg­u­lar­ly leads to clar­i­ty of your mis­sion and how you can best serve others.

Grow­ing research sug­gests that the health­i­est peo­ple are the ones who grow with age and expe­ri­ence; even in times of trou­ble like these.

Spir­i­tu­al Fit­ness, a new con­cept I’d like to share with you, takes PWB fur­ther with four fea­tures that pro­mote health and peace of mind:

1. Patience: Devel­op­ing patience also allows you to slow down and enjoy life, because you’re in the flow of the Uni­verse so it works for and through you.

2. Aware­ness: Aware­ness brings self-acknowl­edge­ment and self- appre­ci­a­tion. Nat­u­ral­ly, when you see your true self with­out judg­ment, you can view oth­ers in the same way and look beyond their faults. This leads to grat­i­tude and for­give­ness, which release anger, a dev­as­tat­ing tox­in to your brain, immu­ni­ty, and genes. As you gain the knowl­edge of who you are on a deep lev­el, you break uncon­scious thought pat­terns that cloud your true iden­ti­ty. This allows you to clar­i­fy your mission.

3. Com­pas­sion: Com­pas­sion or liv­ing with love, is a strength and con­veys kind­ness and empa­thy, which embold­en health­i­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Com­pas­sion also fos­ters clar­i­ty and com­mit­ment and the courage to be your­self with­out fear. You can then pass to the next lev­el of spir­i­tu­al fit­ness, which is sur­ren­der. Phys­i­cal­ly, com­pas­sion is an excel­lent heart healer.

4. Sur­ren­der: “Sur­ren­der to the stretch” is often said in yoga. In this case, the stretch of sur­ren­der is to your spir­it, your soul. It also involves faith and trust in your high­er pow­er. When you sur­ren­der to your soul, you gain the strength to sac­ri­fice and to serve or give to oth­ers with­out thought of reward for your­self. This brings with it a deep and last­ing hap­pi­ness and seren­i­ty, which con­veys peace of mind. Med­ical­ly, gain­ing peace of mind is a tremen­dous immune sys­tem booster.

Sur­ren­der­ing to the stretch in your life is a won­der­ful, over­all ill­ness-pre­ven­tion and anti-aging ton­ic. Per­haps the best one there is. It allows you to mas­ter your­self, your envi­ron­ment, and retain a strong sense of inde­pen­dence and interdependence.

Pur­pose in life involves find­ing mean­ing and direc­tion, espe­cial­ly when con­fronting chal­lenges in times like these. Our true pur­pose, how­ev­er, is to remove the lay­ers of arti­fi­cial­i­ty we have accu­mu­lat­ed dur­ing our life thus far and redis­cov­er our own divine well-being and care­free essence.

Kir­tan Kriya yoga med­i­ta­tion is an impor­tant ingre­di­ent to that, so I’d like to encour­age any­one inter­est­ed to do it the first thing in the morn­ing for forty days. Why forty? Because that is in my expe­ri­ence the amount of time it takes to cre­ate a long-last­ing, ben­e­fi­cial change in your brain, mind, and spirit.

How To Practice Yoga Meditation

Kir­tan Kriya (KK) is based on five spe­cif­ic actions:

1. Breath: The breath flows nat­u­ral­ly. As you prac­tice, you’ll find that your breath­ing rate will slow down. I always notice a deep sigh at about 3 min­utes, which sig­ni­fies the release of tension.

2. Pos­ture: You can sit com­fort­ably with your spine straight in a chair with your feet flat on the floor. Alter­na­tive­ly, you can sit in a com­fort­able, crossed-legged pos­ture on the floor.

3. Sound or Mantra: KK pre­scribes very spe­cif­ic sounds: Saa Taa Naa Maa. The tune to which these sounds are sung is the first four notes of the famil­iar children’s song, Mary had a lit­tle lamb. Your jaw should remain relaxed as you sing, which acti­vates the vagus or anti-stress nerve and thus turns on your relax­ation response. Using the mantra Saa Taa Naa Maa has many won­der­ful ben­e­fits and will take you to new lev­els of health, hap­pi­ness, and spirituality.

4. Fin­ger move­ment or mudras: Using the mudras of KK, which involves touch­ing the fin­ger tips in sequence, gives such a pow­er­ful­ly dynam­ic effect because the hands and fin­ger tips are high­ly rep­re­sent­ed in the brain, reveal­ing why the com­bined effect of the fin­ger touch­ing and singing so strong­ly stim­u­lates it, there­by increas­ing cere­bral blood flow. After all, we are the only species that evolved to be able to speak and use our hands and fin­gers to such an extent.

5. The Focus or Visu­al­iza­tion: The sound is visu­al­ized com­ing down from the top of the head and out through the mid­dle of the fore­head, lined up over your nose like a cap­i­tal “L.” You may think of this action as sweep­ing through like a broom (see below).

Now you’re ready to do it. Here’s how:

• For the first 2 min­utes, sing out loud
• For the next 2 min­utes, sing in a stage whisper
• For the next 4 min­utes, silent­ly say the sounds to yourself
• For the next 2 min­utes, sing in a stage whisper
• For the last 2 min­utes, sing out loud to com­plete the sequence.

When out­side thoughts intrude, sim­ply return your focus to the fin­ger­tips, sounds, and visualization.

To com­plete the med­i­ta­tion, inhale very deeply through your nose, stretch your hands above your head, and then bring them down slow­ly in a sweep­ing motion, as you exhale through your nose. Take a cou­ple of deep nasal breaths before open­ing your eyes and resum­ing your activity.

As we have seen, this prac­tice, even for just 12 min­utes a day, has many impor­tant ben­e­fits on your phys­i­cal and men­tal health, and beyond. To time the exer­cise you can use a dig­i­tal clock, smart phone timer, or watch rather than any type of alarm. Using the avail­able down­load­able dig­i­tal MP3 on the ARPF web­site makes tim­ing your prac­tice easy.

The Evolution Revolution starts now

Now that we are in a reset mode, what some call The New Nor­mal, per­haps it is time to both max­i­mize our immu­ni­ty and to change the world for the better.

Let The Evo­lu­tion Rev­o­lu­tion begin.

12 min­utes of dai­ly KK yoga med­i­ta­tion prac­tice can be a great place to start.

“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” — Sir Paul McCart­ney in The End on Abbey Road by The Bea­t­les, com­posed by Lennon and McCartney.

Yours in Brain Health,

Dhar­ma Singh Khal­sa, M.D.

President/ Med­ical Director

Alzheimer’s Research and Pre­ven­tion Foundation