Gillian Harris: Meditation - mindfulness over matter

Chloe Homewood was introduced to mindfulness when she worked as a film maker for the BBC. During her research into a programme about faith she interviewed Rewatha Theru (known as Bhante), a Buddhist monk who set up Scotland's first Mindfulness meditation centre in Glasgow in 2003.

Using meditation techniques practised by Theravada Buddhists for centuries, Bhante taught mindfulness - the art of living in the moment. Mindfulness encourages students to let go of the past and not to worry about the future. It promises greater clarity of thought, a shift away from patterns of negative thinking and strategies for coping with fear, anxiety and depression. Practitioners claim it can also benefit sufferers of chronic pain, psoriasis and cancer.

"I spent time with Bhante and was really inspired by what I saw," Homewood says. "I had flirted with meditation before, when I was working in a highly charged, stressful environment. After I had children I realised my lifestyle was not conducive to working as a film-maker and it gave me the opportunity to consider different lifestyle choices. When I saw the results of mindfulness, and began to meditate every day, I decided to become involved in something that has been so beneficial to me."

Earlier this year, Homewood and Bhante established Mindfulness Today, a secular social enterprise in Glasgow that uses mindful meditation techniques to help people manage stress. They have seen mothers, office workers, businessmen, pensioners, health care workers, teachers and others seeking help for a host of ailments including stress, chronic pain, high blood pressure and anxiety.

Mindfulness is an ancient practice, but it has never been more popular. There are books, blogs, apps and even university courses on the subject. The approach is being adopted in business, sport, politics and education.

Comedian Ruby Wax extolled its virtues in helping her overcome depression and rugby player Jonny Wilkinson is said to use it to improve his concentration before games.

Last month staff from Google, Facebook and Twitter took part in the Wisdom 2.0 conference to learn how mindfulness could be incorporated into a frenetic work environment.

Kathryn Hill, director of mental health programmes at the Mental Health Foundation, believes encouraging results from research into the health benefits of mindful meditation are responsible for the interest.

"It is rightly regarded as a potentially very effective therapy," she says. "The current economic crisis could also be a factor. In research we conducted in November last year, over half of respondents said the main causes of their stress were money and work. As mindfulness is well known as an effective way of combating stress, it could be that more people are turning to it in these difficult times."

Although some medical professionals remain sceptical, there are a growing number that support patients who want to try mindfulness as a way of managing their anxiety, rather than seeking the answer in a bottle of prescription pills.

Figures from last year show almost one in ten adults in Scotland take anti-depressants. The total number of prescriptions rose to more than 4 million in 2009-2010, at a cost of 32.2 million to the NHS.

According to Hill, mindfulness techniques could go some way to reducing the demand for anti-depressants, but warns that it is not a magic fix. "Everyone's experiences with depression are different, and there is no one therapy that is 100 per cent effective for everyone," she says. "However, a good number of studies have shown that mindfulness can be very effective. We would like to see mindfulness made more widely available to GPs as a potential treatment."

But is mindfulness just the latest fad, a contemporary cure for mild depression in the same way that Prozac was in the 1990s? Homewood says not. "It is about changing your viewpoint and outlook. It is not just about treating a problem but changing the way you view your life. It is more long lasting."

Perhaps some of the claims are far fetched - there is little scientific evidence that it improves fertility, increases immunity or reduces the effects of ageing - but it has shown positive results in relieving stress.

"Personal stress levels of users of our online mindfulness course fall by an average of 38 per cent over the duration," says Hill, "which is pretty impressive." n

www.mindfulnesstoday.co.uk; www.bemindful.co.uk

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 24 April 2011