:: November/December 2005 Volume 4/Number 8

High Marks for Meditation

By LINDA EGENES

 

It’s 5:45 a.m., when most teenagers burrow under the covers, squeezing in another few hours of sleep. Yet that’s the unlikely hour Elliot Onasch, a freshman at Big Bear high school, and his sister Laura, 11, choose to wake up every morning in order to meditate before catching the bus to school. And when they come home, freed at last of the tedium of classes, they close their eyes and meditate again for another ten or fifteen minutes.

Beverly Hills TM teacher Penny Hintz helps coordinate sponsorships for students who want to learn TM as well as school teachers and even entire schools. She is pictured here with students Pamela and Chris Soffer.
Photo: Adam Latham, angeladam.com

“We never have to remind them to meditate,” says their father, Brad, a 30-year meditator who heads up the food service at a year-round YMCA camp in Big Bear Lake, CA, where the family lives. “Learning to meditate was their idea.”

When you talk to Elliot, you get the feeling he’s a kid who knows what he wants. “I enjoy it,” he says. “I started getting calmer. It’s a time that’s more peaceful, when I can relieve myself of stress. I get to experience my inner soul.”
Laura, who started at age 10, says it helps her concentrate. “I went from being a B and C student to getting all A’s this year,” she says.

While they meditate in the predawn dark, Elliot and Laura probably don’t realize that they are among a growing number of young people who are turning to meditation to improve their mental focus, raise their grades and stay relaxed in an increasingly pressured world. While there are many types of meditation, Elliot and Laura practice TM, the Transcendental Meditation technique as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which has been researched and documented perhaps more than any other meditation technique.

How Meditation Helps the Brain
An unlikely proponent of meditation and TM in particular is film director and auteur David Lynch, who this fall conducted a tour of east-coast college towns with quantum physicist Dr. John Hagelin, featured in the recent documentary, What the Bleep Do We Know? More than 8000 students attended their joint lectures on “Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain,” which included a live demonstration of a meditating student’s EEG brain patterns.

Lynch is a supporter of Consciousness-Based education, which in some cases simply means developing the consciousness of the students by teaching them to practice the Transcendental Meditation technique and providing a structure for them to practice it 15-20 minutes daily before and after school. Or it can also mean adding other technologies of consciousness to the standard curriculum in addition to TM—such as yoga and Ayurveda health care—and providing a holistic environment by teaching the children in a Vastu building and serving fresh, organic food in the cafeteria.

Last summer Lynch established The David Lynch Foundation to fund students who want to learn the Transcendental Meditation technique. So far the foundation has dispensed $200,000 to seven Consciousness-Based schools to cover the cost of Transcendental Meditation instruction for its students. It has three phases for development: 1) raise $1.2 million to teach 500 students at American University in Washington, D.C., 2) raise $20 million to teach 10,000 students across the nation and 3) create a $100 million endowment to build and sustain a campus of World Peace in Washington, D.C., which would include Consciousness-Based education in its curriculum.
“In today’s world of fear and uncertainty, every child should have one class period a day to dive within himself and experience the field of silence—bliss—the enormous reservoir of energy and intelligence that is deep within all of us,” says Lynch, 59, who started meditating more than 30 years ago.

Neuroscientist and co-director of brain research for the David Lynch Foundation, Dr. Alarik Arenander explains, “The brain comes only partly assembled. Through life experience, the brain creates the connections that support thinking, decision making and behavior. Children are dependent on their parents and educators to provide the most nourishing experiences to develop their brains.”
But the problem with education in this information age is that it focuses on outward experience, and that’s only part of the equation, says Arenander, a faculty member at Maharishi University of Management who also directs Iowa’s Brain Research Institute and the Maharishi Enlightenment Center in Palm Springs, CA. What’s missing in education today is the knowledge of the knower, of the self and how to develop our full human potential.

“Students will always be looking for more because today’s educational experience doesn’t satisfy the brain, and it doesn’t satisfy the self,” says Arenander. “Consciousness-Based education provides a missing ingredient.”
According to Dr. Arenander, the brain is still undergoing major development until the age of 25-30. The Transcendental Meditation technique develops the whole brain, in particular the frontal lobes or association fibers, which is the area of the brain that processes information brought in through the senses, like the conductor who takes the talent from different sections of the orchestra and puts them together into a whole piece of music. Research shows that the functions of the prefrontal cortex—including memory, learning, emotions, behavioral control, moral reasoning and self-development—are dramatically improved by the practice of Transcendental Meditation.

The research is impressive. Studies in journals such as Personality and Individual Differences, Education and the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, report that the Transcendental Meditation program significantly increases IQ in university students, improves academic performance in elementary students, increases self-actualization in people of all ages and is more than three times as effective in reducing drug and alcohol use as compared to standardized prevention and treatment programs. (And 600 other published studies show holistic benefits in a range of areas such as stress reduction, mental and physical health, and relationships.)

One study, published in Personality and Individual Differences in 1991, found significant increases in IQ, by five points, as measured the Catell-Culture-Fair Intelligence Test, in students at Maharishi University of Management over a two-year period when compared with control subjects from another university.

Another study, published in Education, found elementary school students practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique showed significant gains (more than 20 percentile points in math, 15 percentile points in reading) on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, a nationally standardized test. A related study showed significant gains among high school students, grades 9-12 on the Iowa Tests of Educational Development.

There are no Consciousness-Based schools in the Southern California yet, although Penny Hintz, co-director of the Maharishi Enlightenment Center for Los Angeles, says, “We have plans to teach the Transcendental Meditation technique in inner city schools, using funds from the David Lynch Foundation and matching funds.” Meetings on this will begin mid-October. Meanwhile, a range of other schools across the nation are already using the technique to help kids.

Meditation Over Medication
With four million children diagnosed with ADHD, Sarina Grosswald, Ed.D, had a hunch that the calming technique of Transcendental Meditation might help.
“As a medical educator, I knew the damaging side-effects of these drugs on children,” she says. “I also knew that parents and teachers don’t know of other options.”
She approached the Chelsea Academy in Washington, D.C., a small private school for children with language-based learning differences, and set up a research study to measure the effects of the Transcendental Meditation technique on children who had been diagnosed with ADHD.
“The students saw improvement in organizational skills, memory, problem-solving, problem execution, and decrease in stress and anxiety as measured by standardized tests,” she says. “These results were statistically significant.”
Best of all, said Grosswald, who is preparing the research for publication, the students themselves reported that they felt more confident, more mature, more able to set their own priorities, less stressed.

“One child was the most hyperactive child I’ve ever seen,” she says. “It took teachers 45 minutes just to get him ready to go home each day. The teachers were amazed at how much calmer he became after meditating for a few months.”

Says Grosswald, “With the Transcendental Mediation technique, some ADHD kids never have to go on drugs at all, or if they’re already on them, they can cut back or eventually go off them altogether. And by enhancing brain development, you’re helping other areas of their lives as well.”

A School of Smiles
Eight years ago Carmen N’Nembi, the principal of the Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse of Detroit, a K-8 charter school, decided to introduce the Transcendental Meditation program to her students, teachers and school board. She and her husband had been practicing the technique since 1973.
The students in grades 5-8 meditated together for ten minutes before school started and at the end of the day. The experiment caught the attention of the national press, and hundreds of reporters flocked to the school to experience its tranquil atmosphere.
“That’s when I knew that the children really valued it,” says N’Nembi. “They were able to do it so easily, even with people watching. They really enjoy that ten minutes of silence.”

A research study by Rita Benn, Ph.D., director of education at the Complementary and Alternative Medicine Research Center at the University of Michigan, compared the Nataki Talibah school with another charter school where the students didn’t practice meditation. The findings showed that the Nataki school students who meditated were much more relaxed, peaceful and happy. The results have been presented to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. A follow-up research study is now in the works.
“This has implications in preventing mental health difficulties,” says Benn, “And may reduce the need for medication.”

Grades Up, Fighting Down
George Rutherford, an ebullient school principal, started Transcendental Meditation himself in 1975. He first saw the possibilities for the education when he visited the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment in Fairfield, Iowa, the first Consciousness-Based school in the country, established in 1975. “I saw 700 kids meditating and getting all kinds of academic honors,” he says. “I thought my kids could get the same results.”

At that time he was principal of the Fletcher-Johnson Education Center, a public school in the heart of D.C. with 90% African-American and 10% Hispanic students. Soon his teachers and the fifth- and sixth-grade students were meditating twice a day before and after school.
“It was amazing,” he says. “Before they started meditating, the school was wild, with kids fighting. After, there weren’t nearly as many fights. Attendance went up. Behavior problems went down. And the students scored higher on standard achievement tests.”

Rutherford retired from Fletcher-Johnson in 1998, and is now principal of the Ideal Academy Public Charter School, also in D.C. Already he has 12 of his faculty meditating. He says the teachers don’t get sick as often. This year he plans to start students meditating in fifth grade.
When asked what benefits he’s derived from the Transcendental Meditation program, he says, “I’m 66 and still rolling, sweetheart.”

A Stress Management Tool
Even kids with all the advantages are facing high levels of stress these days. In the L.A. suburb of Calabasas, a few hundred miles northwest of the Onasch kids, two other boys practice Transcendental Meditation before school.
“It’s a good way to relax and help yourself handle the stress of high school,” says Collin, 14. He’s a freshman at Loyola High School of L.A., “where everyone was at the top of the class before and now they’re just average.”

An active kid who plays drums and serves as driver for the school’s water polo team, he says, “I often meditate before games so I can get focused and make sure I do my best.”
Eden Danaher, mother of Collin, says it’s a stress-management tool. “Before school, it sets them up for the day,” she says. “Our other son, Aidan, who’s 11, says it makes his mind sharp. After school, it helps them relax and let go of all the things that are going on in their lives—sports, activities, and all the time we spend in the car.”

Josie Batorski, a studio teacher who has worked on movie and TV sets for the past 12 years teaching child stars, says that the Transcendental Meditation technique helps gifted kids relax.

“My students are in high-stress educational situations with high expectations put on them, and long hours of homework daily,” says Batorski, who has a master’s degree in education specializing in gifted and talented children. “After learning to meditate, fatigue and physical symptoms of stress-related ailments clear up. With growing self-awareness, they flourish in their lives on so many levels.”
Batorski, who started meditating herself at age 15, says, “I did better academically, I became more centered in myself, less overshadowed by teenage dramas. I’d recommend it to teachers, too, who suffer from fatigue, burnout and discouragement. It’s changed my life.”

For more information, please contact
1 (888) LearnTM, (310) 358-1008
or www.tm.org

 

All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2002-2005 LA Yoga Ayurveda & Health Magazine