Meditation muda mudahan (Balinese for ‘hopefully’) – thanks to Harvard.

Harvard Medical is studying the benefits of meditation? Get on board, Harvard!!! Yippeee!!! Meditation has so-called mind-body techniques that can switch on and off links to stress and immune function, including metabolism, insulin secretion, and inflammatory pathways.

Harvard is spending big bucks on scientifically showing us how to have a longer and stress-less lives, have healthy hearts, as well as, laugh more, skip to the light fantastic, eat, sleep, work, love, look better, and generally raise the qualities of our lives up a notch or two or ten. Check out the Bloomberg link; Meditation really is good for you. They are measuring the physiological response to meditation – not just mental, which is an obviation to any and all of us at Bali Silent Retreat.

Rolling our eyes a bit, those of us who’ve been crawling and jogging on the spiritual path for many years, are ever so grateful for Harvard’s ‘discovery’. We stand up and applaud for news-breaking research, which we hope jumps some exponential gaps to universal acceptance of meditation as an essential daily practice. You never know, this could possibly lead to the idea that meditation isn’t all about reducing stress, strengthening bones, or chomping on junk food – that’s just a bonus side affect.

Perhaps and we hope (muda mudahan- Balinese, for hopefully):

• it will lead to embracing a mind-set and then
• maybe a new world view and then
• maybe a lifestyle that does Not loop through the meteor shower of ‘should-s would-s and could-s’ of our social environs.
• Perhaps it will lead to, perhaps again, more than anything else, more of us embracing the familiarity of reverence for the true Self, the Inner Voice, independent our ego’s big and little ‘stories’ – job, money, relationships, right, wrong, etc.

Thanks, Harvard. Bring it on.