Meditation benefits shock the scientific communityPosted by: Peter Ragnar in Emotional Wellness, Natural Healing October 12, 2012 3 Comments(NaturalHealth365) Anyone interested in meditation has most likely come across accounts of meditators claiming amazing longevity. Science has been studying allegations of radical life extension for some time now, and it has become apparent that theres a connection between meditation and longevity. Since the 1950s, there have been more than 3,000 scientific studies on the benefits of meditation for the physical body and brain.Just before writing this article, I became interested in an account of an allegedly 250-year-old yogi. His name was Devraha Baba and he lived on a 12-foot-high platform beside the Yamuna River in Mathura, India. High officials of the Indian government, including Indias first president, Dr. Rajendra Prashad, vouched for the accuracy of his claim. This isnt an exception or solo case: online, youll be able to find numerous accounts and claims of extreme longevity by meditation masters, some true and some fabricated.The secret to living a long, healthy lifeSo what do we really know? According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), It is thought that some types of meditation might work by reducing activity in the sympathetic nervous system and increasing activity in the parasympathetic nervous system. While we may not aspire to the aforementioned yogis lifestyle, most of us would enjoy adding a few more healthy years to our lives along with greater mental clarity.Dr. Robert Keith Wallace was one of the first scientists to study the effects of meditation on aging and he published his findings in the International Journal of Neuroscience (16: 53 58, 1982). His research was based on the practice of Transcendental Meditation. Dr. Wallace found that subjects with an average chronological age of 50 years, who had been practicing Transcendental Meditation for over 5 years, had a biological age 12 years younger than their chronological age.How to cut your biological age in halfThat means a 55-year-old meditator had the physiology of a 43-year-old. Several of the subjects in the study were found to have a biological age 27 years younger than their chronological age. This study has since been replicated several times. Other studies have also shown the beneficial effects of Transcendental Meditation on the aging process. (look up: www.tmprogram.com.au/book/chap_3c.html)My wife and I, according to laboratory blood tests that analyzed our telomeres (a new scientific way to discover the age of the biological body), were both found to be less than half our chronological ages. This was a very encouraging statement after many decades of meditation. This can also be your story.Mediation has surprising health benefitsIt certainly goes without saying that if meditation can help you remain disease-free or even just stack the odds in your favor, it would be something to investigate further. Actually, it appears that the more you meditate, the greater the benefits accrued. As an example, how about increasing circulation by reducing the constricting effects of stress? Meditation starts increasing circulation by as much as 30 percent. After youve become more experienced, you can expect it to increase by