Thank you Kitt, (kittomalley.com) for posting this on your FB page! This is big, very big.

Of course it’s known that meditation has tremendous benefits for practitioners. Now, a study called “Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density” by Hölzel et al, shows how and why. In this Harvard study, they took participants who did Mindfulness meditation 27 minutes per day, for eight weeks and controls who did not meditate. They then took MRI’s of their brains and looked for differences. In the group that practiced mindfulness meditation, the areas in the hippocampus had a major increase in gray matter. The hippocampus is part of the Limbic system, the region in the brain that regulates emotions. They also saw a decrease in the gray matter of the amygdala, the area in the brain that is responsible for stress and anxiety. Therefore, “The results suggest that participation in MBSR is associated with changes in gray matter concentration in brain regions involved in learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective taking.”

So it has now been shown how meditation works! It seems like the perfect thing to do if you have a mood disorder! Will you meditate? Well that’s up to you. For myself, yes. I am starting today.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004979/