More students 'searching for a spiritual meaning'

College students at this university and around the country are increasingly finding meditation a part of their overall health care, as health care providers learn more about the health and cognitive benefits of meditating.

Student groups like the Meditation Club and classes through the University Health Center and Campus Recreation Services are proliferating and promoting meditation as a means to combat anxiety, depression and even drug abuse, while meditation techniques are an integral part of other therapies like the smoking cessation and stress management programs.

At the Center for Health and Wellbeing, Coordinator of Wellness Programs Tracy Zeeger said last spring's decision to add free meditation classes - which became popular right away and continue to bring in about seven students per class - twice a week was encouraged by University Health Center Director Sacared Bodison as a means to bolster the alternative medicine programs at the health center. Zeeger said she has also seen an increase in her appointments for wellness counseling, where she incorporates meditation techniques like concentrated breathing and guided visual imagery into offerings such as relaxation training.

"Meditation falls very neatly into the category of wellness in that it not only promotes physical health but mental and spiritual health as well," Zeeger said. "It can help with students who suffer from depression or mild anxiety. … There are alternatives to prescription pills."

Attendance at the meditation class tallies about as many as the main lobby for the Center of Health and Wellbeing can comfortably hold.

At the Meditation Club meeting on McKeldin Mall Monday, about 30 students gathered in a circle, casting long shadows under the glare of the street lamp as they practiced meditation in silence. The club encourages students from all religious backgrounds to attend, junior history major Ryan Zembik said, and has helped him with stress and controlling his temper.

"It would be to our advantage if a class could present the different forms of meditation and their benefits," Zembik said. "It's good for you, it's healthy, and it's something that people should do that they don't know how to."

"More and more people are searching for a spiritual meaning," said sophomore English major Ivan Goldensohn, a leader of the Meditation Club.

In addition to sessions and clubs, a larger effort to incorporate meditation techniques into higher education is underway with Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education, created in May 2008 as a subset of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. The association is looking at practices from the view of the cognitive benefits and what it offers for learning, rather than incorporating religious beliefs.

"It fits into college life because it helps with sustaining attention and focus and the capability to have insights and be more open to information," said Beth Wadham, the academic associate for ACMHE. "Educators have been experimenting, and it's starting to coalesce into a movement that's getting its quantitative research together."

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Center for Alternative Medicine found that more than 40 percent of Americans have used alternative medicine therapies at some point in their lives, and that percentage is greater for those with a college education, according to the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Associate professor of philosophy Allen Stairs was awarded a $10,000 grant from ACMHE in 2006 to implement contemplative practice into the classroom. He used it to fund a onetime class on Vipassana meditation at the university last spring. Meditation in the classroom was difficult, he said, but he's working on how to more effectively incorporate meditation study and techniques for a future class he hopes to run. One benefit he said he hopes he gave his students is the ability to look at their own thoughts objectively, rather than buying into all of them.

"In the broad teaching culture and on this campus, there is room to try different approaches to the subject and how they learn," Stairs said.

Goldensohn said that in spite of an increased interest in meditation, there is still a stigma that it involves "sitting cross-legged and going, 'Omm.'" But the benefits are tangible and he said he no longer suffers from the insomnia that plagued him as a child, or the drug abuse he turned to as a teenager.

"Meditating is something that almost everyone does everyday, whether it's fishing, swimming or lifting weights," he said.

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