Eh, while the study in question by Rosenthal and company was tiny and had no control group, it was still a quite impressive finding.
My point isn't so much that mindfulness doesn't have an effect on PTSD, but that the media hypes it as being very strong, while ignoring the evidence that TM's effects on stress are demonstrably far stronger. Stress isn't the only thing going on in the world, and isn't the only cause of mental and physical problems, and mindfulness' effects on the brain are quite different than TM's, so it is entirely possible that mindfulness will prove to be more therapeutic about many things in specific people than TM is. But on raw measures of stress-redection, my expectation is that TM will always prove superior, just because that is all TM is, really: Just stress reduction. Maharishi's description that the mind is allowed to wander in the direction of greater happiness, which also happens to be the state of least excitation of the brain, is very accurate, according to all the research. That's an important thing. It facilitates healing in nearly all situations. I saw "nearly all" because there are people who become more anxious, the more relaxed they get, and it may be due to a different mechanism than Maharishi's "stress release model" that he came up with to describe the cycle of activity during TM, and no doubt there are other exceptions. But for most people, TM's stress-reduction is a Very Good Thing that can help heal nearly any condition. L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : From: "LEnglish5@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> Norman Rosenthal led a study on TM and PTSD that found that in 2 of the 5 subjects, brain imaging showed that the abnormally active amygdala had reset after teh first meditation, and stayed that way for the rest of the study. People are desperate to find that mindfulness works, so they report even the most trivial findings as though they were important. TMers are so desperate to "prove" TM to be "the best" that they'll diss any study that involves a "competing" meditation technique, no matter how trivial they claim it is. :-) ALL "research" on TM will be forever tainted because of the indoctrination given those who conduct the research by Maharishi and his parrot-teachers. From Day One of their exposure to TM they've been told that it's "the best," at the same time that they were told that all other techniques were garbage. That kind of indoctrination creates fanatics and cultists, not scientists. You *don't* see people doing research into other techniques of meditation wasting their time trying to prove them "superior" to TM, or to anything else. They're content to do real research to see whether the technique they're studying has some beneficial effect. It's only *TM* "researchers" who are so petty as to feel the need to constantly put down other techniques and the researchers who study them.