Dr. Richard Davidson

And with just this minimal amount of practice you see a significant reduction in IL-6 over the course of 28 days, 5 minutes a day.

We've actually seen changes in the microbiome and we've seen changes in the brain.

with just this minimal amount of practice.

But the important point is that you're doing it every day.

When people ask me what's the best form of meditation that they should do if they're just beginning, I say the best form of meditation you can possibly do is the form of meditation that you actually do.

So figure out what that form of meditation is and then stick to it.

Do it every single day.

It makes sense.

And I think that there's an element of truth to it, but I also think that there's some additional...

discussion that we should have about it and dialogue.

So first of all, these practices have been around for, you know, 2500 years or more.

It's not like they've been invented in the modern era to deal with the separation that has occurred between humans and the natural world that is a distinctly modern

kind of invention.

So that's one thing.

The second thing is that, yes, I agree with you that the characteristics that we're talking about as traits that are outcomes of these practices, there are many ways to get there.

And there are probably natural ways to get there that don't require meditation.

In fact, you know, when we, in our early days, we interviewed these

practitioners around Dharamsala, India, who were practitioners that the Dalai Lama referred us to, who were spending 30 years in retreat.

They're called hermit monks and you have to hike for three hours to find their cave.

And we interviewed these people.