By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times | May 13, 2008

LOS ANGELES - Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker whose ingenuity and daring saved 2,500 Jewish children from extermination in the Holocaust, a feat that went largely unrecognized for 60 years, died yesterday in Warsaw. She was 98.

She had been hospitalized since last month with pneumonia, according to Pawel Maciag, a spokesman for the Polish embassy in Washington.

Ms. Sendler has been called the female Oskar Schindler, but she saved twice as many lives as the German industrialist who sheltered 1,200 of his Jewish workers. But unlike Schindler, whose story received international attention in the 1993 movie “Schindler’s List,” Ms. Sendler and her heroic actions were almost lost to history until four Kansas schoolgirls wrote a play about her nine years ago.

“One person can make a difference,” Megan Felt, one of the students who wrote the play, said yesterday of Ms. Sendler.

“Irena wasn’t even 5 feet tall, but she walked into the Warsaw ghetto daily and faced certain death if she was caught. Her strength and courage showed us we can stand up for what we believe in, as well,” said Felt, who now helps raise funds for aging Holocaust rescuers.

Ms. Sendler was born Feb. 15, 1910, in Otwock, a small town 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. She was an only child whose parents raised her to care about those in need. “I was taught that if you see a person drowning, you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not,” she told the British newspaper Express in 2005. She was especially influenced by her father, a doctor who defied anti-Semites by treating sick Jews during outbreaks of typhoid fever. He died of the disease when Ms. Sendler was 9.

She studied at Warsaw University and was a social worker when the German occupation of Poland began in 1939. In 1940, after the Nazis herded Jews into the ghetto and built a wall separating it from the rest of Warsaw, disease, especially typhoid, ran rampant. Social workers were not allowed inside the ghetto, but Ms. Sendler, imagining “the horror of life behind the walls,” obtained fake identification and passed herself off as a sanitary worker, allowed to bring in food, clothes, and medicine.

By 1942, when the deadly intentions of the Nazis became clear, Ms. Sendler joined a Polish underground organization, Zegota, recruited 10 of her closest friends and began rescuing Jewish children.

They smuggled the children out in boxes, suitcases, sacks, and coffins, sedating babies to prevent their cries. Some were spirited away through a network of basements and secret passages.

Decades later, Ms. Sendler was still haunted by the parents’ pleas, particularly those from families who ultimately could not bear to part from their children.

“The one question every parent asked me was, ‘Can you guarantee they will live?’ We had to admit honestly that we could not, as we did not even know if we would succeed in leaving the ghetto that day. The only guarantee was that the children would most likely die if they stayed.”

Most of the children who left with Ms. Sendler’s group were taken into Catholic convents, orphanages, and homes and given non-Jewish aliases. In the hope that she could reunite them with their families later, Ms. Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper. She preserved the precious scraps in jars and buried them in a friend’s garden.

She was captured by the Nazis in 1943 and tortured but refused to tell her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried.

During one particularly brutal torture session, her captors broke her feet and legs and she passed out. When she awoke, a Gestapo officer told her he had accepted a bribe from her comrades in the resistance to help her escape. With her name on a list of executed prisoners, Ms. Sendler went into hiding but continued her rescue efforts.

Felt said that Ms. Sendler had begun her rescue efforts before she joined the organized resistance and helped a number of adults escape, including the man she later married. “We think she saved about 500 people before she joined Zegota,” Felt said, which would mean that Ms. Sendler ultimately helped rescue some 3,000 Polish Jews.

When the war ended, Ms. Sendler unearthed the jars and began trying to return the children to their families. For the vast majority, there was no family left. Many of the children were adopted by Polish families, and others were sent to Israel.

In 1965 she was recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Authority, as a Righteous Gentile, an honor given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Nazi reign. In her own country, however, she was unsung, in part because Polish anti-Semitism remained strong after the war and many rescuers were persecuted.

Her status began to change in 2000, when Felt and her classmates became involved. Through the sponsorship of a local Jewish organization, they traveled to Warsaw in 2001 to meet Ms. Sendler, who helped the students improve and expand the play. It has been performed more than 250 times in the United States, Canada, and Poland.

After each performance, Felt and the other cast members passed a jar for Ms. Sendler, raising enough money to move her into a nursing home with round-the-clock care. They and the teacher who assigned them the play project, Norman Conard, started the Life in a Jar Foundation, which has raised more than $70,000 to help pay for medical and other needs of Holocaust rescuers.

Last year Ms. Sendler was honored by the Polish Senate and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, which brought dozens of reporters to her door. She told one of them she was wearying of the attention.

“Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this earth,” she said, “and not a title to glory.”

Ms. Sendler leaves a daughter and a granddaughter.

Physical/Social Pain Overlap Theory

A summary of the Eisenberger and Lieberman study on how social pain (exclusion, rejection, loss of relationship) is experienced in the brain in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)  the same way physical pain is experienced.  Using advanced imaging technology, it was found that be it physical pain or the social pain of exlusion, the SAME brain area responds. In other words, the experience of social pain or relational disconnection is a very real biological experience similar to that of physical pain. Let’s all continue working toward developing good healing connections with others.

The full study is written up here.

From Dr. Daniel Amen, e-newletter.

As I travel the country promoting brain health (and I’ve been traveling a lot recently!) I am often asked for practical suggestions about how we can care for our brains. The truth is, you are not stuck with the brain you have. I have seen my own brain function improve dramatically over the past 20 years as I’ve practiced a basic brain-healthy lifestyle. Here are 10 simple things you can do to improve your brain function and, subsequently, the quality of your life…

1. Protect your brain from head injuries and toxic exposure. Head injuries, even minor ones can change the course of your life. Your brain is very soft and your skull really hard. Wear your seat belt and think of golf and table tennis rather than football and soccer. Toxic exposure from drug or alcohol abuse, excessive caffeine or nicotine use, environmental toxins ruin brain function, sometimes permanently. As you would not put toxins in your gas tank (duh!) do not put them into your body and brain.

2. Put good food into your brain each day. You are what you eat. Every cell in your body makes itself new every 5 months. You literally are what you eat. In the book Super Foods there is a list of the 14 best foods, which are all very good for brain function. Try to incorporate them into your diet every week. Here’s the list: blueberries (most berries, but especially blueberries), broccoli, beans (pinto, navy, lima, chickpeas, lentils, sugar snap peas, peas), oranges, oats, pumpkin (squash not pie), wild salmon, spinach, soy, tea (especially green), tomatoes, turkey (or chicken), walnuts, and yogurt.

Put this together: for breakfast, have a bowl of oatmeal and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice; for lunch have a spinach salad with tomatoes, sugar snap peas and lean turkey, for a snack have soy beans; for dinner have a piece of grilled salmon with mixed broccoli and pumpkin squash; for desert have a cup of nonfat plain yogurt mixed with a serving of blueberries, ¼ cup of freshly squeezed orange juice and a small handful of walnuts; for beverages, lots of water (the brain is 80% water) and a glass or two of green tea.

3. Take a 100% RDA multiple vitamin everyday. In the age of fast food diets we generally do not eat in a healthy balanced way. A number of studies have shown that children learn better when they are taking multiple vitamins. Also, ensuring you have enough B vitamins helps the body counteract stress and lower homocysteine levels. High homocysteine levels have been associated with heart disease, strokes and Alzheimer’s disease.

4. Be selective about what you watch on TV. New learning causes new connections in the brain, while no learning causes disconnections. In this age of cable and satellite TV, there are wonderful programs that can stimulate thought and learning, and there are many programs that have little redeeming value. Too many hours spent watching mindless programming can have a negative effect on brain function. Work to learn something new everyday. Einstein said if you study anything for 15 minutes a day in a year you will be an expert. Time to get back to the books.

5. Physical exercise at least 3-4 times a week is essential to brain health. Physical exercise enhances blood flow to the brain, protects brain cells against stress, helps to preserve mental abilities, decreases the risks of heart disease, vascular disease and diabetes and improves your mood. You need to make exercise a habit if you want your brain to look and feel young.

6. Destress the brain. Stress kills cells in the hippocampus of the brain, affecting memory and mood. Take a moment each day to breathe and settle down. I think we all should meditate, do biofeedback, self hypnosis or spend time each day in prayer. I did a study in 2003 on meditation sponsored by the Alzheimer’s Prevention Foundation and Dr. Dharma Singh Kalsa. We found that meditation had measurable, positive, physical effects on the brain helping with stress, focus and spirituality.

7. Correct the negative thinking patterns that put your brain at risk for anxiety, depression, relationship and job problems. Most people are never taught to correct the Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) that infest their brains. Thoughts are just thoughts, not facts. Thoughts often tell you lies and fill you with hear. If you never question or challenge the negative thoughts that go through your brain you believe them and these erroneous little bugs can ruin your life. You need to develop an internal anteater to keep your brain healthy. Whenever you feel sad, mad, or nervous, write down the automatic thoughts that go through your mind, if they are negative and distorted, talk back to them. You do not have to believe every thought you have.

8. Make love for the brain. Did you know that sexual frequency has been associated with longevity? According to a 1997 British Medical Journal study from Queens University in Belfast, Ireland researchers tracked 1,000 middle-aged men over 10 years. They found that men who reported the highest frequency of orgasm enjoyed a death rate half that of those who lagged behind. In another study, men who had sex at least three times a week decreased their risk of a heart attack or stroke in half! Other studies have shown that regular sex improved sleep, moods and testosterone levels. Research from the University in Pennsylvania reported that individuals who have sex at least once or twice a week showed 30% higher levels of an antibody called immunoglobulin A, which is known to boost the immune system. A study from researchers at the National Cancer Institute suggested that increased sexual frequency lowered the risk of prostate cancer. The same benefits were found for women!

9. Make sure to get enough sleep each night. Getting less than 7 hours of sleep at night decreases overall blood flow to the brain. Making love at bedtime often helps people get to sleep as it raises oxytocin levels, which in turn raises endorphins and helps you feel calm and peaceful.

10. Treat brain problems early. A very high percentage of the world’s population will develop a mental illness at some point in their lives. The most common illnesses are anxiety, depression, ADD, and substance abuse problems. These illnesses are bad for the brain and bad for people’s lives and families. They are also highly treatable. Successful people have problems. They just get help. The earlier you get help the better.

As a neuropsychiatrist for over 20 years my clinics have amassed the world’s largest database of brain scans related to behavior, more than 43,000. The brain is involved in everything we do and must be considered whenever we look at the motivation or reason behind human behavior. Give these steps a try, you’ll notice a difference and so will those around you.

To your brain health,

Daniel

Daniel Amen, M.D.
CEO, Amen Clinics, Inc.
Distinguished Fellow, American Psychiatric Association

Have you ever been in so much pain that you thought you were going to die?

Have you ever suffered so much that you wanted to die?

Every year, hundreds of millions of individuals in the U.S. do suffer to death. Slowly. Excruciatingly.

Egg-laying hens packed in tiny cages, unable to move because of how crowded they are, can have their toes literally grow around the wire mesh of the cage floor, keeping them from getting to food or water.

Pigs, transported hundreds and hundreds of miles in all weather in open trucks without food or water – can freeze to death.

Chickens raised for meat, bred to grow so large so fast that their legs break under their own weight, leaving them incapacitated and unable to get food.

Vegan Outreach leafleter Wayne Hsiung described watching a downed dairy cow’s last few moments:

An hour before I was planning to leaflet, a friend of mine called and said that he had spotted a stalled transport truck with a downed dairy cow inside.

I arrived to witness a grisly scene. The poor girl was collapsed on the ground inside the truck, in a 3-inch-deep cesspool of feces and urine. You could see her wide, terrified eyes staring into nothingness, her entire body quivering ever so slightly. But she was making no sounds. The other cows had trampled her broken body; she had bloody wounds and bright red lesions that were clearly visible through the filth. Her udder was swollen to many times its normal size. We noticed a ghastly sliver of flesh on a gate mechanism above her. (It was later suggested to us that this might have been her tongue. Cows tend to lick the sides of the truck in search of moisture, but when it’s a frozen mechanized gate, that desperate attempt can have tragic consequences.)

Our poor friend died that day, on the filthy floor of a bloody transport truck. We witnessed her body go cold, and her eyes stop moving. Her entire life had been enslaved and twisted by violence and prejudice.

Words cannot convey the horrifying conditions that bring about these slow, agonizing deaths – how the animals are bred, how they “live” on factory farms, and, for those who survive the brutal system, how they are butchered in industrial slaughterhouses. No verbal or even video description can begin to capture it; even visiting these confinement warehouses and slaughterhouses can’t begin to convey what it is like to live one’s entire life there, to be callously killed in the end.

It is enough to know that modern agribusiness is so inherently brutal that it will kill off, pre-slaughterhouse, hundreds of millions of animals through slow, agonizing means, simply as a cost of doing business. This is a system of cruelty so vast, so intense, that it really is beyond comprehension. As Michael Pollan wrote in the New York Times:

More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here in these places life itself is redefined—as protein production—and with it suffering. That venerable word becomes “stress,” an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution, like tail-docking or beak-clipping…. Our own worst nightmare such a place may well be; it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born beneath these grim steel roofs, into the brief, pitiless life of a “production unit….”

This is the system we endorse and support when we purchase its products. Consuming flesh foods from modern agribusiness not only pays others to exploit and butcher fellow feeling beings; it not only affirms the view of animals as unconsidered cogs in the machine of profit; but our purchases are what give agribusiness the resources needed to grow and brutalize more of our fellows.

This is enough to compel me to be a vegetarian, to make a daily, public statement against the breathtaking viciousness behind meat, eggs, and dairy.

For me, being a vegetarian is not the conclusion of an impartial set of utilitarian calculations, nor the endorsement of “animal rights.” Rather, being a vegetarian is a statement about the person I want to be: that I could not live with myself if I were to be a part of such unwatchable cruelty to animals. The phrase is: How could I look at myself in the mirror? And that is literally how it happened for me – looking in the mirror and realizing I couldn’t consider myself a “good person” if I continued to pay others to brutalize animals so I could eat them.

But of course, not everyone makes this choice. With factory farms concealed and society structured around eating faceless meat, we can easily refuse to take a stand and set ourselves apart. And if confronted with the hidden realities of modern agribusiness, we can seek out the “less bad” and call it good.

For example: Michael Pollan, quoted earlier, not only isn’t a vegetarian – he actively mocks the “moral certainty” of vegetarians. He fabricates fantastic rationalizations to continue eating animals. For example, he says that thinking in terms of individual animals is human-centric, and that we need to think in terms of species’ interests. Of course, this is exactly backwards. “Species” is a human construct, an abstraction that inherently can’t have interests. Only individuals have the capacity to experience pleasure or suffer pain and thus have interests. That we should eat the flesh of our fellows to advance the “interests” of a species is so absurd, such a perfect inversion of reality that it is truly stunning that an otherwise seemingly intelligent person would be willing to spout such ridiculous nonsense. Pollan is the perfect example of Cleveland Amory’s observation that people have an infinite capacity to rationalize, especially when it comes to something they want to eat.

(This may seem an unnecessarily harsh condemnation of a man who at least is willing to write about factory farms. But Pollan not only mocks vegetarians via laughable strawman arguments, he even rationalizes the brutal act of force-feeding geese to create foie gras! This level of repulsive rationalization should be exposed for what it is.)

Pollan’s unwillingness to seriously consider vegetarianism, combined with his firsthand experience of “our own worst nightmare,” leads his rationalizing capacity to praise “happy” meat from “humane” farms. Having had the time and resources to investigate the various farms available, the pinnacle of Pollan’s praise is Pollyface farm, where “animals can be animals,” living, according to Pollan, true to their nature.

So what is Pollyface like? Rabbits on the farm are kept in small suspended-wire cages. Chickens are crowded into mobile wire cages, confined without the ability to nest or the space to establish a pecking order. Pigs and cattle are shipped year-round in open trucks to conventional slaughterhouses. Seventy-two hours before their slaughter, birds are crated with seven other birds. After three days without food, they are grabbed by the feet, up-ended in metal cones, and, without any stunning, have their throats slit.

This is the system Pollan proclaims praiseworthy. While mocking vegetarians, he argues we should ethically and financially endorse Pollyface’s view and treatment of animals.

But really, how can we expect better? In the end, Pollyface’s view is the same as Tyson’s – that these individual animals are, ultimately, just meat to be sold for a profit. It is logically and emotionally impossible for there to be any real respect, any true, fundamental concern for the interests of these individuals when these living, breathing animals exist only to be butchered and consumed. If we insist that we must consume actual animal flesh instead of a vegetarian option, it is naïve, at best, to believe that any system will really take good care of the animals we pay them to slaughter. If you say an individual is just meat, they will be treated as such.

In the end, it really is a question of what kind of person we choose to be. Or, to think about it another way – what is the narrative of our life? Is it that we oppose cruelty or support slaughter? Do we make our own decisions or do we rationalize what we’re used to doing?

I believe there are more important things in life than accepting the status quo, following the norms of society, and taking the easiest path. Furthermore, choosing the road less traveled does not necessitate denial and deprivation. Making our lives a part of something larger expands our life’s narrative, enriches our existence, and allows for real meaning and lasting happiness. Writing our own narrative frees us from the constraints of the “norm.” Choosing to be a vegetarian makes a public, powerful, ethical statement – not just about the suffering of animals, but about the strength of our character. (I discuss this in more detail in “A Meaningful Life.”)

I ask you to consider one more thing.

The average American consumes about three dozen land animals every year. By choosing to be a vegetarian, you will accomplish a great deal of good over the course of your life – you will spare many hundreds of animals from the malicious maws of modern agribusiness.

But get this: Tomorrow, you could accomplish much more, in just one hour!

This may sound like an informercial scam, but it is true – for every person you convince to go vegetarian, you double the impact of your life’s choices. So, if tomorrow you hand out 60 booklets to new people, and just one person decides to go vegetarian, you will have saved, in only one hour, just as many animals as you will save with every single choice you make over the rest of your life.

In other words, if we agree that being a vegetarian is important, that standing up and speaking out for the animals and for ourselves is crucial, then we must also recognize that being an effective advocate for the animals is many times more important. Efficient outreach has truly enormous potential; if you think compound interest is a good deal, effective vegetarian advocacy allows for exponential returns!

In his book, Meat Market, Erik Marcus writes:

When I was a teenager, my greatest ambition was to one day be a millionaire. [Later] I adapted the millionaire concept for purposes of activism…. I wanted to [keep] a million animals out of slaughterhouses…. But is it realistic to think that a typical person could keep a million animals from slaughter? Absolutely! … At two thousand [land] animals saved per new vegetarian, this means that during your life, if you convince five hundred young people to become vegetarian, a million animals will be saved.

With a reasonable level of investment, each one of us can do this. You don’t need to start a group. You don’t need to pass a law. You just need to make the choice to join with the others who are writing their own narrative, who are working for something bigger than just themselves. We can provide you with lessons from decades of experience and all the tools you need. Vegan Outreach exists to help everyone and anyone, in every situation, be the most effective advocate possible for the animals – for a world not just a bit less bad, but for a fundamentally better world.

Leaflets don’t print themselves, however. Vegan Outreach is dependent upon the financial support of those who recognize the importance of effective advocacy. There are many demands on our limited time and money, and we must choose to invest our scarce resources to do the most good. Working to expose and end the hidden horrors of factory farms is, we believe, the best possible investment. Every new vegetarian pays dividends every year, in terms of their food choices and the example they set for others.

In 2007, Vegan Outreach distributed 1.8 million booklets – 56% more than 2006. This was only possible because, from fiscal year 2006 to 2007, contributions to Vegan Outreach also rose exactly 56%. A donation today will lead to more booklets to more people tomorrow, which will lead to new vegetarians and myriad animals spared this year and every year!

In the end, in our hearts, we know that, regardless of what we think of ourselves, our actions reveal the kind of person we really are. We each determine our life’s narrative. We can, like most, choose to allow the narrative to be imposed on us, mindlessly accept the current default, follow the crowd, and take whatever we can.

Or we can actively author our lives, determining for ourselves what is important. We can live with a larger purpose, dedicated to a better world for all.

The choice is fundamental. The choice is vital. And the choice is ours.

By Eric Ball, from Vegan Outreach 

People ask me all the time, ‘Tom, why do you meditate?”. My usual response is ‘Sit quietly and breath for five minutes, without distraction, and you will know why’. There is a sense of calm, peace, reconnection, awareness and insight that emerges. It is a remembering of what’s important. A clarity about who I am. About the essential oneness of this Universe.

By increasing awareness of thought, feeling, emotion, and sensation we are training our brains to be more attentive. In essence we connect with ourselves and the world around us with greater compassion. This awareness can show itself up in the choice of words we use to describe situations, people and experiences in our life. Becoming more conscious (aware), also causes me to think through such things as my choices of laundry detergent and cleaning products in relation to their impact on the environment. The food I eat. How it was prepared, harvested or obtained. Was there needless suffering involved. Awareness helps make an ordinary life extraordinary.

Meditation also helps me appreciate the beauty in nature such as this Lady Slipper Orchid I spotted hiking in Purgatory Chasm.

“Breathing in, I take in the beauty of nature around me.

Breathing out, I smile”.

Consider joining us for meditation.

May 27, 2008

Lotus Therapy

By BENEDICT CAREY

The patient sat with his eyes closed, submerged in the rhythm of his own breathing, and after a while noticed that he was thinking about his troubled relationship with his father.

“I was able to be there, present for the pain,” he said, when the meditation session ended. “To just let it be what it was, without thinking it through.”

The therapist nodded.

“Acceptance is what it was,” he continued. “Just letting it be. Not trying to change anything.”

“That’s it,” the therapist said. “That’s it, and that’s big.”

This exercise in focused awareness and mental catch-and-release of emotions has become perhaps the most popular new psychotherapy technique of the past decade. Mindfulness meditation, as it is called, is rooted in the teachings of a fifth-century B.C. Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha. It is catching the attention of talk therapists of all stripes, including academic researchers, Freudian analysts in private practice and skeptics who see all the hallmarks of another fad.

For years, psychotherapists have worked to relieve suffering by reframing the content of patients’ thoughts, directly altering behavior or helping people gain insight into the subconscious sources of their despair and anxiety. The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process — and ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words cannot reach. “The interest in this has just taken off,” said Zindel Segal, a psychologist at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where the above group therapy session was taped. “And I think a big part of it is that more and more therapists are practicing some form of contemplation themselves and want to bring that into therapy.”

At workshops and conferences across the country, students, counselors and psychologists in private practice throng lectures on mindfulness. The National Institutes of Health is financing more than 50 studies testing mindfulness techniques, up from 3 in 2000, to help relieve stress, soothe addictive cravings, improve attention, lift despair and reduce hot flashes.

Some proponents say Buddha’s arrival in psychotherapy signals a broader opening in the culture at large — a way to access deeper healing, a hidden path revealed.

Yet so far, the evidence that mindfulness meditation helps relieve psychiatric symptoms is thin, and in some cases, it may make people worse, some studies suggest. Many researchers now worry that the enthusiasm for Buddhist practice will run so far ahead of the science that this promising psychological tool could turn into another fad.

“I’m very open to the possibility that this approach could be effective, and it certainly should be studied,” said Scott Lilienfeld, a psychology professor at Emory. “What concerns me is the hype, the talk about changing the world, this allure of the guru that the field of psychotherapy has a tendency to cultivate.”

Buddhist meditation came to psychotherapy from mainstream academic medicine. In the 1970s, a graduate student in molecular biology, Jon Kabat-Zinn, intrigued by Buddhist ideas, adapted a version of its meditative practice that could be easily learned and studied. It was by design a secular version, extracted like a gemstone from the many-layered foundation of Buddhist teaching, which has sprouted a wide variety of sects and spiritual practices and attracted 350 million adherents worldwide.

In transcendental meditation and other types of meditation, practitioners seek to transcend or “lose” themselves. The goal of mindfulness meditation was different, to foster an awareness of every sensation as it unfolds in the moment.

Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught the practice to people suffering from chronic pain at the University of Massachusetts medical school. In the 1980s he published a series of studies demonstrating that two-hour courses, given once a week for eight weeks, reduced chronic pain more effectively than treatment as usual.

Word spread, discreetly at first. “I think that back then, other researchers had to be very careful when they talked about this, because they didn’t want to be seen as New Age weirdos,” Dr. Kabat-Zinn, now a professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Massachusetts, said in an interview. “So they didn’t call it mindfulness or meditation. “After a while, we put enough studies out there that people became more comfortable with it.”

One person who noticed early on was Marsha Linehan, a psychologist at the University of Washington who was trying to treat deeply troubled patients with histories of suicidal behavior. “Trying to treat these patients with some change-based behavior therapy just made them worse, not better,” Dr. Linehan said in an interview. “With the really hard stuff, you need something else, something that allows people to tolerate these very strong emotions.”

In the 1990s, Dr. Linehan published a series of studies finding that a therapy that incorporated Zen Buddhist mindfulness, “radical acceptance,” practiced by therapist and patient significantly cut the risk of hospitalization and suicide attempts in the high-risk patients.

Finally, in 2000, a group of researchers including Dr. Segal in Toronto, J. Mark G. Williams at the University of Wales and John D. Teasdale at the Medical Research Council in England published a study that found that eight weekly sessions of mindfulness halved the rate of relapse in people with three or more episodes of depression.

With Dr. Kabat-Zinn, they wrote a popular book, “The Mindful Way Through Depression.” Psychotherapists’ curiosity about mindfulness, once tentative, turned into “this feeding frenzy, of sorts, that we have going on now,” Dr. Kabat-Zinn said.

Mindfulness meditation is easy to describe. Sit in a comfortable position, eyes closed, preferably with the back upright and unsupported. Relax and take note of body sensations, sounds and moods. Notice them without judgment. Let the mind settle into the rhythm of breathing. If it wanders (and it will), gently redirect attention to the breath. Stay with it for at least 10 minutes.

After mastering control of attention, some therapists say, a person can turn, mentally, to face a threatening or troubling thought — about, say, a strained relationship with a parent — and learn simply to endure the anger or sadness and let it pass, without lapsing into rumination or trying to change the feeling, a move that often backfires.

One woman, a doctor who had been in therapy for years to manage bouts of disabling anxiety, recently began seeing Gaea Logan, a therapist in Austin, Tex., who incorporates mindfulness meditation into her practice. This patient had plenty to worry about, including a mentally ill child, a divorce and what she described as a “harsh internal voice,” Ms. Logan said.

After practicing mindfulness meditation, she continued to feel anxious at times but told Ms. Logan, “I can stop and observe my feelings and thoughts and have compassion for myself.”

Steven Hayes, a psychologist at the University of Nevada at Reno, has developed a talk therapy called Acceptance Commitment Therapy, or ACT, based on a similar, Buddha-like effort to move beyond language to change fundamental psychological processes.

“It’s a shift from having our mental health defined by the content of our thoughts,” Dr. Hayes said, “to having it defined by our relationship to that content — and changing that relationship by sitting with, noticing and becoming disentangled from our definition of ourselves.”

For all these hopeful signs, the science behind mindfulness is in its infancy. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which researches health practices, last year published a comprehensive review of meditation studies, including T.M., Zen and mindfulness practice, for a wide variety of physical and mental problems. The study found that over all, the research was too sketchy to draw conclusions.

A recent review by Canadian researchers, focusing specifically on mindfulness meditation, concluded that it did “not have a reliable effect on depression and anxiety.”

Therapists who incorporate mindfulness practices do not agree when the meditation is most useful, either. Some say Buddhist meditation is most useful for patients with moderate emotional problems. Others, like Dr. Linehan, insist that patients in severe mental distress are the best candidates for mindfulness.

A case in point is mindfulness-based therapy to prevent a relapse into depression. The treatment significantly reduced the risk of relapse in people who have had three or more episodes of depression. But it may have had the opposite effect on people who had one or two previous episodes, two studies suggest.

The mindfulness treatment “may be contraindicated for this group of patients,” S. Helen Ma and Dr. Teasdale of the Medical Research Council concluded in a 2004 study of the therapy.

Since mindfulness meditation may have different effects on different mental struggles, the challenge for its proponents will be to specify where it is most effective — and soon, given how popular the practice is becoming.

The question, said Linda Barnes, an associate professor of family medicine and pediatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine, is not whether mindfulness meditation will become a sophisticated therapeutic technique or lapse into self-help cliché.

“The answer to that question is yes to both,” Dr. Barnes said.

The real issue, most researchers agree, is whether the science will keep pace and help people distinguish the mindful variety from the mindless.

A variety of meditative practices have been studied by Western researchers for their effects on mental and physical health.

Tai Chi

An active exercise, sometimes called moving meditation, involving extremely slow, continuous movement and extreme concentration. The movements are to balance the vital energy of the body but have no religious significance.

Studies are mixed, some finding it can reduce blood pressure in patients, and others finding no effect. There is some evidence that it can help elderly people improve balance.

Transcendental Meditation

Meditators sit comfortably, eyes closed, and breathe naturally. They repeat and concentrate on the mantra, a word or sound chosen by the instructor to achieve state of deep, transcendent absorption. Practitioners “lose” themselves, untouched by day-to-day concerns. Studies suggest it can reduce blood pressure in some patients.

Mindfulness Meditation

Practitioners find a comfortable position, close the eyes and focus first on breathing, passively observing it. If a stray thought or emotion enters the mind, they allow it to pass and return attention to the breath. The aim is to achieve focused awareness on what is happening moment to moment.

Studies find that it can help manage chronic pain. The findings are mixed on substance abuse. Two trials suggest that it can cut the rate of relapse in people who have had three or more bouts of depression.

Yoga

Enhanced awareness through breathing techniques and specific postures. Schools vary widely, aiming to achieve total absorption in the present and a release from ordinary thoughts. Studies are mixed, but evidence shows it can reduce stress.

Link to NYTimes story site.