At health clubs like Crunch Fitness and around the country, breathing and stretching are replacing jumping and pumping. The number of Americans doing traditional aerobics dropped from 28 million in 1992 to 23 million last year. New York's Equinox gym has doubled its classes devoted to no-impact workouts. People are going inward as opposed to just exploding the energy outward. That, in turn, causes warm blood to flow from the heart to extremities.
People come to the clinic with panic disorders, which are usually treated with medication.
We don't address their panic or fear directly, we just treat them with mindfulness, and they practice that over the course of eight weeks. Their levels of anxiety and panic drop dramatically over the eight weeks and, according to our later study, for at least three years. Patients are simply asked to observe, to be mindful, to stay in the body, and to watch what's going on in the mind, learning neither to reject things nor to pursue things, but just to let them be and let them go. This is not your father's basketball coach. He teaches meditation at least as earnestly as he teaches the triple- post offenses.