Dr. Ramesh Manocha on OzIndian TV Show

Now I’m happy to introduce dr. Ramesh Manocha from Sydney University. Doctor, welcome to Oz Indian.

Dr Manocha: Thank you.

Interviewer: Maybe we can start off by asking you about your own background, your title and where you are working.

Dr Manocha: I’m a GP at the also the Department of Psychiatry, Sydney University where I occupy a position of senior lecturer and my area of research interest is meditation and other non pharmacological options for mental health.

Interviewer: Thanks, doctor. Of course, we have heard of the various meditative techniques that are being used but maybe we can start out by asking you, is there awareness, enough awareness in western world about the eastern techniques?

Dr Manocha: I think there is a great deal of awareness amongst western consumers about meditation and that awareness is increasing over time, so say 20 years ago, maybe 30 years ago, meditation was known about in the West but it was regarded as a very fringe idea. Now, it is moving very much into the mainstream to the point where mainstream medical practitioners health professionals are starting to pay attention to the clinical potential of meditation for enhancing health and well-being and potentially even to improve illness.

Interviewer: Of course, we were discussing a few minutes back then, we are all students of logic, we are looking for evidence-based research. Is meditative technique supported by evidence based research?

Dr Manocha: Well, I would say that as a result of the research that’s been done at Sydney University and the University of New South Wales by my team, I would say it is now. And the reason that I say that is because there has been about 30 to 40 years’ worth of research done in the West on meditation but a lot of that research has been what I would call soft to medium level research. But what we did in our research program was really apply the scientific blowtorch to the core issues and questions around meditation. And they are, first of all, whether or not there’s anything more than a placebo effect and secondly, the big question is how do you define meditation in order to understand what the magic ingredient is? Because we have a conundrum. We have the ancient understanding of meditation which says that is something remarkable. It involves the awakening and unleashing of our inner potential with natural effects on our body and mind but at the same time, the scientific evidence up until our research didn’t really agree with that perception. And so, we found that the problem was that the definition of meditations that were being used by western scientists were not consistent with the ancient Indian understandings. But when we took that ancient Indian understanding of meditation and applied it using western scientific methodology, we did start to see very real and powerful effects.

Interviewer: Now, of course, this program is about mental well-being. How can meditative techniques help in getting better, if someone has got a mental illness?

Dr Manocha: I would say first of all, rather than looking at mental illness, let’s look at mental well-being. I think that’s the number one area that meditation has relevance because it’s about, meditation was developed as a way of preserving our mental health and well-being and enhancing it. This is where the eastern idea of mental health and well-being differs from western ideas in that the eastern idea not only talks about mental illness and things like depression and schizophrenia and things like that but it also has an idea of mental wellness or peak wellness, we can talk about the optimal state of being. And this is something that the eastern masters of meditation and yoga were aspiring to when they developed these techniques that you and I know about today, whereas in the West, the western systems of health are focused more on disfunction and unwellness, so illness. But when we talk about what is possible within us to be well and to function optimally, very little science has been applied to that. That’s really the
reason why meditation existed as a method by which we can obtain and maintain optimal mental and physical function. By taking the meditation tradition from India, bringing it to the West, I think the chief role that it has is as a technique that can help your average Western person look after their mental well-being and prevent mental illness.

Interviewer: Right, so it’s might a preventive technique?

Dr Manocha: I think so. It certainly can be used for what we would call high prevalence or mild to moderately severe mental illnesses, things like depression and melancholy and grieving, anxiety, stress, certainly very powerful for these kinds of problems. But when you’re getting into the very, very serious conditions, so you know, psychosis, schizophrenia, bipolar, meditation may be helpful, but it is, I think, when you get to the point where people are using medications, we have to be a little more cautious about applying meditation, particularly the idea of meditation being used alone and I think anyone with a mental illness who wants to meditate, should speak to their supervising health professional first and do it very cautiously and in a very moderate way until they’re confident that it is helping them. Interviewer: So you can say that this is more a supplement to the modern medicine? Dr Manocha: It’s a supplement to modern medicine, I think as far as serious mental illness is concerned but it is probably the most powerful tool for the prevention of mental illness. It’s a very, very powerful lifestyle factor that we can introduce at minimal expense and minimal inconvenience but with potentially tremendous benefits.

Interviewer: There are various meditative techniques that I know of, in fact, as I was telling you, I myself practice meditation. Therefore, I was wondering what is the specialty of the meditative technique that you are researching at Sydney University.

Dr Manocha: That’s a good question. Our focus has been on one particular technique called Sahaja yoga and the reason that we have focused on Sahaja yoga is because the primary focus of the Sahaja yoga meditation technique is the experience of what’s called traditionally, nirvichara samadhi, or thoughtless awareness or what we can describe to laypeople as simply as the experience of mental silence, being fully alert, fully aware but not experiencing any unnecessary mental activity. This experience, this experience definition of meditation is the most consistent definition with the ancient tradition. You can find the world’s oldest definition of meditation known to man is in the Mahabharata and in that definition is very clear that the experience of mental silence, the cessation of thinking activity is the key and core feature of meditation. The thing that distinguishes meditation from simple relaxation or contemplation or prayer or walking the dog or cutting the vegetables. That’s the key feature. So, we have designed all of our experiments, our clinical trials around evaluating the impact of that experience particularly. And we have a whole range of experimental data demonstrating that it is in fact this key ingredient that gives the mental health benefits to the practitioner.

Interviewer: Well, as that saying that the mind is like a monkey, it keeps jumping from one thought to another, I have tried a thoughtless mind for 15 seconds and I can’t. And I’m sure many of our viewers, if you ask them to try to just have a thought free mind for say 10 minutes, they would come back and tell me that it’s almost impossible. How do we practice it? What does the research finding say about reaching that kind of a potential where you can actually practice Sahaja yoga?

Dr Manocha: Again, very good question and I’ll give you some evidence from our studies where we’ve taken, now, we have a sample size of several hundred people, teaching complete novices this technique and we’ve asked them to simply indicate how many of them experience that state of complete silence, where there’s no intervening thoughts. The first time, about ten percent in the first try will get that experience. After the second attempt, that percentage goes up progressively to twenty, thirty, forty percent. Long-term practitioners are even better at it, about at any given time if we were to sit them down and ask them to meditate, they’re reporting the experience in about 50 percent of attempts. What that means is that meditation is, first of all, it’s not the appearance of meditating, it’s the experience of meditation or mental silence that gives a benefit. but the experience is dynamic and changing all the time. So, it’s a little bit more like surfing, you catch good waves and not so good ones, and some days, the surf’s good, some days the surf’s not so good. The skill is to catch that wave of silence and then ride that way for as long as you can. A skilled meditator can catch the wave quite easily and can ride the wave for quite a long time, whereas a less skilled meditator takes a little more practice. But there’s something unique about Sahajayoga and we’re still trying to work out what it is that makes it very easy for people to tap that experience much more easy than say if I would be practicing a commercial technique or a technique or simply relaxing. There’s something about those affirmations that are given in the book, the methodology developed by the founder of Sahaja yoga, that makes it very easy for people to tap the experience quite quickly.

Interviewer: My own observation doctor, layman’s observation obviously, is that mental illness is somebody is trying to tell themselves the wrong things, the negative things all the time. And it’s important to train their mind to start telling them all positive things themselves, talk to themselves about positive things. Do you agree with them?

Dr Manocha: I half agree. I agree that a lot of mental illness is related to what you describe, which is called negative self-talk, basically, negative thoughts and feelings. When those negative thoughts and feelings become overwhelming, the person goes from being functioning well to dysfunctional or completely and utterly non-functional. Effectively, in many ways, they are immobilized by these negative thoughts and feelings. That’s where the experience of mental silence can be very powerful in that it gives the person the ability to jailbreak themselves from this negative thinking cycles. They develop a skill of just shutting off the thoughts. So, in that respect, I agree. The thing that you might find surprising is that positive thinking, at least the scientific evidence for positive thinking, doesn’t necessarily support the idea that positive thinking is much better than negative thinking or at least that positive thinking is not a cure in itself. It’s certainly better to think positive than to think negative but the application of positive thinking as a therapy for mental illness is not always very effective. What I suggest is that we need something beyond positive thinking and that is no thinking and in that state of non-thinking, those what we call those negative thought circuits that have set themselves up in the circuitry of the brain can be dissolved, can fade away and that leaves space for the more naturally positive thoughts to emerge over time. But that, I think, at least this is my supposition, that the experience of mental silence facilitates that much more powerfully than say, positive thinking.

Interviewer: Now, can we talk about your book doctor? Silence Your Mind., that’s the book and doctor Manocha, if you can tell us what is this book about and give us a bit of an overview about this book.

Dr Manocha: Sure. The book describes about 15 years of systematic research that we’ve been doing in Australia on this approach to meditation, this understanding of this phenomenon called mental silence and it also touches briefly on research done in India which is very high quality research as well, certainly in the context of the time at which it was conducted. And importantly, it demonstrates not only the philosophical validity of this idea of mental silence, that the fact that mental silence is the authentic definition of meditation but then, it provides the scientific evidence for the positive impacts of this experience on health, well-being, physical and mental function, as well as the ability to start tapping into those optimal capability states. Probably the most important thing is that the book provides at least 50 pages’ worth of practical instruction how to actually do the technique without necessarily spending piles of money.

Interviewer: Okay, if our viewers are interested in getting hold of this book, where do they get it, doctor?

Dr Manocha: Well, it’s in all good bookstores, probably in bad bookstores as well. You can buy it online obviously, on Australian bookstore websites and certainly, if it’s not in the bookstore near you, then ask them to order it.

Interviewer: Is there a website our viewers can access?

Dr Manocha: There’s a website for the book and the website is beyondthemind.com.

Interviewer: beyondthemind.com and that web address is at the bottom of the screen and for those viewers who are contemplating getting some help in trying to overcome their mental problems, if they or their friends or relatives have it, what kind of advice would you give them doctor?

Dr Manocha: I would say don’t spend any money on commercialized meditation techniques, practice a technique for which there is good scientific evidence, don’t do anything extreme or bizarre and probably predictably get the book and use the methods described in the book. They’re evidence-based, they’re specific to modern western population, such as here in Australia and we know that they work.

Interviewer: Doctor Ramesh Manocha, thanks for coming along and talking to OzIndian.

 


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