Do the meditation practices taught in this program and in other health care settings have any thing to do with “Eastern Religions” or cults?
As mentioned previously, human beings of all faith traditions have practiced meditation as part of their spiritual life. The ability to develop calm and focused attention, and the cultivation of deeper and broader present moment awareness (mindfulness), are both vital supports to any genuine spiritual practice, and thus, both of these benefits of meditation have been developed and enjoyed by countless spiritual seekers. The use of meditation practices here in the West, largely for health benefits and promoted and investigated by the emerging field of mind-body medicine, for practical purposes, is only about 25 to 30 years old at present. Because of this absence of a previously developed and mature methodology of meditation for health promotion in Western medicine, many of the meditation methods now taught in the West for health purposes owe some (or considerable) debt to the instructions and experience detailed by meditation teachers of more ancient traditions. There already exists an
