“Over my career in the past 20 years, these high tech advances are nothing compared to low tech spiritual technologies like meditation.” – Dr. Sara Gottfried
In this Speakeasy talk from Wanderlust Squaw Valley 2014, Dr. Sara Gottfried, a Harvard-trained MD, author, and founder of the Gottfried institute, discusses the benefits of meditation and how a simple daily practice can change the inner ecosystem of the body.
After years of being a dedicated, driven, career-minded individual, Dr. Gottfried found herself struggling to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Run down and exhausted, she turned to the medical community for answers. In this instance, they let her down. Instead of addressing the root of her problems and exploring the reason behind why these feelings might be happening, doctors focused on her symptoms. They prescribed anxiety drugs, birth control, and medication for depression, except she wasn’t depressed. They never once took into account her busy life and the demands parenthood might be placing on her.
So Dr. Gottfried took matters into her own hands. She changed directions completely, making her health a top priority and deciding what was important in her life. After becoming a certified yoga teacher, she applied her medical expertise to the practice of meditation. Research has shown that meditation not only calms the mind and balances the psyche, but also has a measurable benefit on the systems of the body. Scientists at the University of Washington have been studying the effects of long term meditators, participants who have clocked over 10,000 hours, and found that their brain waves are actually different than people who do not meditate at all. In this enlightened community we need to bridge the gap between traditional and complementary medicine. We are so quick to embrace the newest and most impressive medical practices, while the most effective may be the oldest of them all.
“One of the things you find, often different spiritual disciples are often grouped together under this umbrella of meditation—meditation, mindfulness, pranayama, love, and kindness—there are all these different ways to access this idea of meditation.” – Dr. Sara Gottfried
For more information visit saragottfriedmd.com.