More than four years ago Time magazine reported over ten million Americans meditate and since then the number has constantly grown. Once thought of as a ritual performed by men who shaved their heads, wore long robes and lived in a mountain cave, this mind quieting, stress relieving natural self-healing practice is becoming so commonplace that corporations such as Deutsche Bank, Google and Hughes Aircraft recognize the intuitive powers of it and offer meditation classes to their employees.

In addition, the scientific community has stepped up to the plate and is offering factual data to support many of the proclaimed benefits of meditation. Studies on the effects meditation has on the brain and body have been going on for quite some time at institutions such as the Brain Imaging Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale and the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Scientific Benefits
Clinical findings from the work done at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine show that people who meditate correctly and on a regular basis have produced measurable changes.

For instance, eighty percent of hypertensive meditation patients lowered their blood pressure and decreased medications while 16% were able to discontinue using their medication all together. One-hundred percent of patients who suffered with insomnia reported improved sleep from meditating and the majority of them were able to reduce or eliminate sleeping medication. In addition, folks who suffer from chronic pain reduced their physician visits by thirty six percent and open heart surgery patients had fewer post-operative complications, all due to a regular practice of meditation.

And, it doesn't stop there. Women also benefit greatly from meditating. Findings concluded that women who experience severe PMS had a 57% reduction in physical and psychological symptoms. And, infertile women who meditate have a 42% conception rate. In addition, these women also showed decreased levels of depression, anxiety, and anger.

The research into meditation has also turned up some interesting physical results. Areas of the brain which deal with attention and processing sensory input have been found to actually thicken. Sara Lazar, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School noted, "These increases are proportional to the time a person has been meditating during their lives". She went on to report, "This suggests that

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