Graceful viewers, welcome to Healthy Living on Supreme Master Television. This week we present the conclusion of a two-part interview with Dr. Joan Borysenko, a renowned pioneer in the field of integrative medicine or medicine that treats the whole person, with a focus on the interaction between the mind, body, and spirit.

Dr. Borysenko, a vegan who received her doctorate in medical sciences from Harvard Medical School in the US, is a licensed psychologist, director of the Claritas Institute for Interspiritual Inquiry Mentor Training Program, in-demand lecturer and bestselling author. Her latest book is called “Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive,” which is about emotional and physical exhaustion and how to overcome these challenges. Let’s now rejoin our interview with Dr. Borysenko to find out some of the benefits of mediation and how it improves our overall health.

If you look at the literature on meditation, Dr. Herbert Benson was amongst the first people, he worked with a wonderful man by the name of Keith Wallace, and they found that when people meditated, a part of the brain was actually stimulated that decreased sympathetic nervous system activity. That’s the fight or flight response. When you meditated that went down.

And the parasympathetic nervous system activity, that’s the relaxing branch of your nervous system, when you feel peaceful like when you eat, you salivate, that’s your parasympathetic nervous system. When your hands are warm, your parasympathetic nervous system is more active. And so that’s what happens when you meditate.

In other words, what it is, is it helps to reverse the stress response. Stressful emotions – everything from anger to holding on to a grudge, feeling that constant sense of inner turmoil to anxiety, it can really cause the body to go out of balance.

So it’s wise certainly physically and emotionally to learn how to meditate. And there are many forms: secular forms and sacred forms of meditation, which means it’s great for everybody because you don’t have to have a particular belief system to meditate. On the other hand, every religious tradition that we know, if you look certainly beyond the surface, they have some sort of meditative practice involved with them. And so, for example, in Catholicism people do the Rosary.

Buddhists will use prayer beads. In the Islamic faith they also use a tasbih, a mala, of generally 33 beads to represent the 99 names of Allah. And there are various other ways that don’t involve particular mantras or the use of malas in religious kinds of observance. So, for example, in mystical Judaism one might be meditating on the four letters in Hebrew of the Divine name which are Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.

Those are actually all vowel sounds. It actually means “What is, what was and what may be.” And so meditation on the Divine letters is a way. Or in Catholicism there’s been some wonderful work bringing back some of the interests of Thomas Merton who was a very interesting, interesting Catholic priest. All mystics generally have had a form of meditating in that tradition.

Contacting one’s real self and drawing closer to God to find everlasting peace is fundamental to all religions. In her book “7 Paths to God,” Dr. Borysenko successfully demonstrates to the reader that there are many different spiritual paths which lead to the same destination.

I grew up near Concord, Massachusetts (USA) where Ralph Waldo Emerson did his writing, where (Henry David) Thoreau, the nature mystics, came together and it was actually nature itself that really spoke to them. And for a lot of people if you say, “What is it that relaxes you? What takes away the stress? When do you feel most yourself?” And they will say it’s being out in nature. So that’s for many people a “path.” Then just very briefly, you have a path of meditation, for example.

There are some people who really are going to be quite serious meditators and then many people that’s not their path. Then you have a heart-based path, for example, which would be devotion to some aspect of the Divine.

There are people who are devoted to Jesus Christ or who are devoted to the Dalai Lama as an incarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Or people who are devoted to any aspect you can think of the Divine, to a particular guru or master and that sense of connection of holding that holy ideal in their heart is a path to God.

There are many different paths. You know one of the paths that I think is frequently the most difficult is, there’s a kind of path of power. It involves a great deal of really personal power which can get misdirected into power over (creation) instead of feeling your power along with all of creation.

But I think we are all unique expressions of the Divine. And as unique expressions there’s a different path that will work for each person. And so when I wrote the book “7 Paths to God” that was what I was exploring - how we are all unique and there’s a way for all of us.

Sages and saints of the past and present have advocated that humanity adopt a plant-based diet. A vegan lifestyle not only offers countless health benefits, but also uplifts our mind and spirit.

A plant-based diet is very important physically, emotionally, and spiritually. People keep saying they are confused what diet is good to eat and it’s really not confusing. The nutritional information is very, very clear that animal protein, for example, is a promoter of cancer, that it irritates the inside of the blood vessels, that too much protein is excreted through the kidneys and it pulls calcium out of the bones. And most of the chronic illnesses that affect particularly Westerners are diet-based. So there’s that.

But the spiritual benefits are great of a plant-based diet. For many people who become vegans, there is a sense, “I don’t want to eat animal meat because it creates suffering,” so it’s a way of promoting non-violence and non-harm and that’s important because there’s a recognition an animal is conscious too. It’s a conscious being just like me and I think it feels very good to people to be honoring that.

A mark of those who have walked the spiritual path and become one with the Creator, is their overflowing love for all beings. Let us hear what Dr. Borysenko has to say about love and how it affects the body at the biochemical level.

There are particular hormones that are released. I am not going to go through all the chemical names because there are very specific ones. But these hormones, for example, there is one that relaxes your blood vessels, nitric oxide, that’s released also in meditators. Oxytocin, the hormone that bonds mothers with babies, that’s what’s released when we are loving and a score of other hormones, all of which have positive effects on health and wellbeing.

And these days we all want to know: What happens in the brain? What hormones are released? But don’t you think love is proof enough all by itself? Isn’t love what we live for? Every human being wants to be able to give and receive love.

And when we’re in that state, we are peaceful. When they’re in that state we feel connected with something larger than ourselves. We recognize this is a very important thing and spiritually what it is, is that we’ve become, in some way the false self that keeps us out of our own true nature. We are in the glory of the Divine, which is part of our own true nature.

Without meditation or other ways to balance our lives like yoga, we risk burnout or sheer physical and mental exhaustion in this hectic, fast-paced world.

Burnout is a very discreet condition. People often make the mistake of thinking it’s depression or they think it’s just stress but it’s not caused by stress, although as you get burned out it’s more and more stressful. And eventually you become so overwhelmed, so unable to feel empathy with others, so critical of your own performance that you fall into depression. So that’s a major difference.

But when people have really looked at burnout, I think of it as really a spiritual condition. That when we feel really connected to life, connected to other people, connected to nature, it’s such a wonderful state. It’s the natural state of the human being. And burnout is the opposite, where as it progresses you feel more and more intensely separated so that it’s harder to enjoy beauty, it’s harder to really relate to another person, you develop much more of a sense of cynicism.

And burnout in healthcare providers is actually called “compassion fatigue.” You feel so physically drained and emotionally overwhelmed that when a person who needs your help shows up you just you can’t meet them there and it’s a very sad thing.

Fortunately there are a number of stages. And if you learn to say, “I am working too much, I don’t even care anymore about somebody’s birthday because I have too much to do. I am kind of losing my values.” If you start to realize “Hmm, I am getting kind of snippy with people that I love, getting a little sarcastic.” For example, you begin to notice, “Really whatever I do never seems to be enough; I just can’t get to that place where I feel good enough.”

Eventually what happens if you become aware of these things is you realize, “Hmm, I am on the wrong path.” These are danger bells and they’re kind of urgent flags that say, “Course correction is needed.” So burnout is really a spiritual opportunity.

Our thanks Dr. Borysenko for your time and many insights on how to keep a balanced lifestyle and the importance of contemplation and spirituality. We applaud you for promoting the practice of meditation, as introspection truly helps bring about a more harmonious planet.

For more details on Dr. Joan Borysenko, please visit www.JoanBorysenko.com
“Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive,” and other books by Dr. Borysenko are available at the same website

Kind and caring viewers thank you for your wonderful presence today on Healthy Living. Coming up next is Science and Spirituality, after Noteworthy News. May all beings have lives filled with love, thus bringing peace and joy to all hearts.