Can Vedic Meditation Help ADD/ADHD?

Can Vedic Meditation Help ADD/ADHD?

[00:45] Q – What’s the Vedic Take on ADHD?

Hey Thom, this is another Tom from Sydney, Australia. I would love to get the Vedic perspective and/or your sort of wisdom on ADHD. My 16-year-old daughter has just been diagnosed with ADHD, and, you know, they suggested Ritalin. I’ve been doing a lot of looking into it, and I just have various questions in my own head, and your tradition has a lot of wisdom. I would just love to know the Vedic take on ADHD and teenagers, teenage girls. Any thoughts or wisdom you might have would be fantastic to hear. Thank you.

[01:23] A – Distractible and Wiggly

Hey Tom, nice to meet another Thom. Yes, the Vedic worldview is very congruent and shares affinity with the cognitive neuroscience view, another area in which I have some specialty—Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and its first cousin, ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder.

ADD and ADHD seem to be buzzwords these days, and, like with everything, it’s become almost trite to say this word, but there’s a spectrum. The spectrum word is the trite word, meaning it’s a little bit overused—“on the spectrum.”

Well, that is to say, everything can be viewed as having a spectrum. There’s a spectral array of almost everything.

Why are there so many ADD and ADHD diagnoses going on these days? Well, there are a few reasons for it. Once upon a time, we didn’t know how to measure it as well as we know how to measure it today. It often went unnoticed in the past and was simply considered to be some kind of dysfunctional personality trait that a person had—someone who couldn’t pay attention for very long and was a bit wiggly, kind of wiggly and restless, not being able to pay attention, and eminently distractible.

ADD is just distractible, and ADHD is, you’re distractible and wiggly too. Wiggly and distractible, ADHD. And just distractible, ADD. That’s the simplest way of looking at these things.

Now we have tools for measuring it, but what we’re actually learning—and what we have learned in the last 20 years—is that there is a spectral array. That means there are people who are a little less wiggly than others, people who are more wiggly, and people who are extremely wiggly.

[03:42] The State of Humanity

People who are less distractible than others, people who are more distractible, and people who are extremely distractible. So now that we have an array, and we have the measuring tools to measure it, we’re making a discovery—an enormous percentage of the population is somewhere on this spectrum.

We’re not rigidly set. We might be higher and presenting with more symptomatology at a more intense level of the spectrum at certain times of day, certain seasons, or under certain conditions, than we are at other times, in other seasons, or under other kinds of conditions.

Those who have had these diagnoses need to be aware that what we’re basically measuring is a human condition. It’s rapidly becoming true, what stand-up comedians are beginning to say now with their eyes rolling, “Everybody has ADHD.”

It seems like a thing everybody seems to have. If you don’t have it, it’s just because you haven’t been measured for it. If it hasn’t been diagnosed, it’s because nobody’s bothered measuring you. You probably have it to some extent or another, sometimes very intensely, sometimes less intensely.

So what is ADHD? Basically, it’s the human condition. It’s the state of humanity. It’s just that some people have more intense versions of it that come and go in their intensity.

[05:22] A Deep Need for Boundlessness

So first of all, let’s get out of the pathological mentality of it, Tom, and just say, we’re basically talking about human beings. Your daughter is diagnosable because she’s presented, at particular times and in particular states, with more of this distractibility and more of this kind of wiggliness than the average for the population.

People who are supposedly neurotypical—meaning they’re somewhere in the middle—are not actually bereft of ADHD or ADD. They just have a very small amount of it compared with others who have more of it. So, like that, we need to understand this in more broad terms in the way that I’m describing it.

Now, what causes distractibility and its accompanying wiggliness—hyperactivity? I call it wiggliness because people tend to wiggle a lot. They tend to move around, their legs wiggle and things like that. That’s the hyperactivity thing. Their distractibility manifests as them turning their head around in a kind of rather birdlike fashion.

When birds stop at the bird bath to have a little drink, they poke their beak in and look up and look around. They poke their beak in again, look up, and look around. A little bit of a birdlike function, checking out everything before having another sip.

What is it that causes the distractibility that cascades into hyperactivity?

We have to understand, first of all, that the human brain has a deep and not dismissible need for free-floating, boundary-free exploration.

We have a need to be able to gaze out of the window and watch the wind blowing the leaves around on the trees and to forget the room in which we are. We have a need for this.

A need for boundlessness without that other word we’ve turned into almost a religious fervor in the West—the word is focus.

[08:06] Focus is Overdone

Focus sounds so wonderful because we’ve indoctrinated ourselves to make it sound wonderful.

The word focus means to exclude—to pay attention to a single point, one-pointedness, with no other thing entering into one’s point of view whatsoever, no matter how charming it might be. To be able to focus sharply is thought of in Western psychological circles and in our Western society as being the supreme state.

But what does it mean? You’re able supremely to ignore everything else, everything in the room, every other thought, every other concept. You’re able to exclude. Focus means exclude, and we have convinced ourselves as a society that this is the only valuable human trait to culture, and we have overdone it—grotesquely overdone it.

We have translated to our children: only focus. Only the ability to exclude absolutely everything except one thing. The ability to focus is the only thing valuable to culture and life. Any tendency of the mind to vary from one thing is a waste of time, and it’s going to get you nowhere.

Because if you can’t focus, then you can’t have a cascade of actions that are going to come from that which you can—oh, here it comes—monetize, which you can turn into money.

So people who can focus sharply, we make the assumption, are people who are going to produce actions that are going to get them various kinds of accreditation from an unfocused world. They’ll look at the focused one and give them credit, and they may have credit for being a great artist, a great musician, a great scientist, or a great businessperson.

What’s the way in which this has value? It attracts money. And money, after all, is going to be the thing that gives you the freedom to have a life of happiness.

All of this is very, very hokey thinking. It’s unsustainable thinking, and it’s thinking that ignores mountains of evidence.

The mountains of evidence are largely that we live in a world that is fixated on becoming a billionaire, or a multi-billionaire—better still—and yet we find that it’s very difficult to locate a billionaire who is living a life of complete, supreme fulfillment and happiness and wisdom.

Even though there are thousands upon thousands of billionaires whose lives you can study, you’re not going to be studying the life of someone who is like Lord Buddha, or the life of someone who is like Anandamayi Ma, the great female saint of India, a picture of the capacity, with perfect timing, to say exactly the right thing and to be a fountainhead of wise and trusted counsel to anyone.

This is not what we attribute to billionaires.

And so, how did a billionaire get to be a billionaire? By focusing, by excluding. You exclude, you exclude, you exclude, and you get what you want: some dollars in the bank. If we’re going to be really frank, this is the kind of mentality we are engendering in our children.

[12:39] A Strategic Approach Through Vedic Meditation

“Focus is the thing. If you can’t focus, you’re pathological. You have ADHD, or you have ADD. We have labels for it, and we have drugs for it—dexamphetamine, Ritalin.”

Basically, you give kids speed. And interestingly, speed somehow does cause the mind to dive into a capacity for temporary focus.

What is the cure for all of this, this whole sociopathology?

It is to have a strategy. A systematic experience of unboundedness of the mind. To develop satiety. Satiety is a fancy word for satisfaction. Satiety means achieving satisfaction in the experience of, in this particular sense, unboundedness of mind.

During Vedic Meditation, our mind settles down to less and less excited consciousness states—not through focusing. Not through telling the mind, “Only go inward, only experience this,” but through, in fact, defocusing.

The practice of Vedic Meditation is exactly a practice that involves learning how successfully to achieve diligence in defocusing, in non-focus.

The mind doesn’t plummet in a straight line from conscious, active thinking—or distracted thinking even—and plummet straight into oneness with Unboundedness. No.

The mind rather wafts its way inward in the same way that a leaf, a broad leaf detaching from a tree high up on a branch, will make its way toward the ground certainly, but it is excursive. It wafts a little bit to the left, and then wafts back to the fall line of the direct line to the earth. But it doesn’t stay on that for very long.

It wafts a little bit to the right, and then it wafts past the fall line again, and wafts to the left. The overall direction of the leaf, swinging from left to right, left to right, taking its time, is to land on the ground state, the ground.

During Vedic Meditation, the mind does not attain to the Unboundedness of inner Being by going in a straight, concentrating, focusing, excluding line.

The mind wafts its way inward effortlessly. For those of you who know how to practice Vedic Meditation, you’ve experienced this.

For a little while, the mind is experiencing that mantric awareness, and then it goes off into thought excursions. And then it comes back to the mantric awareness—that’s the inner draw. And then it goes off into more thought excursions.

[16:15] The Brain Becomes Global

It’s an excursive experience of wafting inward to an inner unbounded state that is all-inclusive. All-inclusive is the opposite of exclusive. It is the ultimate defocused state, the ultimate defocused state.

Our brain, which has two halves—the synthetic half, which is the right cerebral hemisphere, and the analytic half, which is the left cerebral hemisphere—has its functioning coordinated through the corpus callosum, a coaxial cable of neurons that connects the two halves and is designed to coordinate their function.

During the practice of Vedic Meditation, the left analytical, linear, mathematical thinker and the right aesthetic, synthetic, spatially-oriented hemisphere begin to normalize. They begin to equalize in their power output.

During the deepest phase of the practice of meditation, the brain becomes global. It becomes not left dominant or right dominant. It becomes a global brain.

It is the ultimate defocused state. It’s a perfect prototype of readiness to now come out of meditation and come back into activity, to be as inclusive or exclusive as is needed.

Bottom line here, Tom, is satiety, satisfaction, at being able to just be defocused for a solid 20 minutes or so, has been attained to. The brain which is satisfied in being able to be excursive, the brain which is satisfied in being able to be unbounded, now will happily go into the boundaries and stay in the boundaries as long as it’s functional to stay in them.

[18:44] Exclusive Thinking is Not the Holy Grail

What is the cure for ADD, ADHD? It is not to keep suppressing the mind’s desire to be excursive. If we keep suppressing it, and we use drugs to constantly suppress it, and we stick with this idea that only focus—only exclusive thinking—is the holy grail, then our brain is going to learn how to get outside the boundaries imposed on it.

In later life, we’re going to experience early dementia. That’s my belief. That’s my theory.

Two things that have become very common in our Western diagnostic of human brain behavior are an astonishing increase in ADD/ADHD in younger life, and an astonishing increase in dementia at earlier and earlier stages of life in people who get beyond the age of, say, 50 or 60—the early onset of forgetfulness.

What’s happening here?

Our brains are wanting to have their excursive experience. They want to get outside the boundaries, outside of the constant whip-cracking, “Focus, focus, focus!” They’ll find a way of doing it, even if they have to engage in pathology.

So, in the psychopathology of ADHD/ADD or dementia, the brain breaks the boundaries and gets outside of the constant demand for focus.

This cruelty that we’ve imposed on ourselves—focus, focus, and only focus is valuable—we break this cruelty by exposing ourselves twice every day, morning and evening, to a good solid 20-minute experience of excursiveness, freedom, and liberation of the mind.

Then, it’s directional. It wafts inward in a rather unbounded fashion into the ultimate Unboundedness—the ultimate all-inclusivity, the ultimate defocused state in transcendence.

Saturating itself in that satiety, the brain comes back into eyes-open waking state. The mind will more effortlessly concentrate. The mind will more effortlessly allow itself to sit on a singular object because it’s had the satisfaction of Unboundedness as a strategy, morning and evening, morning and evening, morning and evening.

So the ability to focus, and to stay still while focusing—that’s the hyperactivity part—spontaneous, natural stillness while happily, without any effort, staying on a singular point for however long it’s relevant. That should come spontaneously to a person who’s given their brain satiety, satisfaction, and excursiveness as a daily, twice-a-day strategy.

[22:25] All-Inclusive Thinking

And this is why I believe that we see people who are in the more intensive end of the spectrum of ADD/ADHD and dementia get better when they practice Vedic Meditation on a regular basis.

I propose that Vedic Meditation—is not only curative of ADD/ADHD, it is preventative.

And so, it needs to be practiced by everyone because we’re entering now a phase of humanity which, due to the worshipping of the word focus, which means, parenthetically, exclude, we are seeing major consequences.

This is what we’re doing as a society. We achieve what we want by excluding—ignoring the interests of others. We achieve what we want by ignoring and excluding the interests of Nature, the ecology, and the environment.

We’re willing to cut right across the interests of others, ignoring their pain or their needs, in order to get what we want. That’s focus—that’s excluding.

Do you see what focus is doing to us? Exclusive focus is killing our relationship with each other. It’s killing our relationship with Nature. It’s having a killing effect.

And that’s because we don’t have satiety.

So let’s give our brains the capacity to operate globally—synthesis and analysis as one global phenomenon. All-inclusive thinking.

All-inclusive meaning, “I am a master of Unboundedness and consequently I’m a master of boundaries.”

Let’s get that 16-year-old daughter of yours practicing Vedic Meditation twice every day, Tom. My team can arrange that. Just go to ThomKnoles.com and ask the question.

And then you also, Tom, need to be an exemplar of non-negotiable, twice-a-day practice. So when she looks at Daddy, she sees him doing the thing that he’s recommending to her.

And let’s see if we can decrease dependency upon Ritalin.

Ritalin is a fine thing. It’s functional as a tactic. It’s not a long-term strategy.

Jai Guru Deva.