How Meditation Can Help Veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Filmmaker David Lynch is teaming up with celebrities and war veterans to launch "Operation Warrior Wellness", a meditation-based programme to help veterans overcome stress-related disorders.

At the upcoming benefit event, Change Begins Within, Lynch will be joined by Clint Eastwood, Russell Simmons, Mehmet Oz, Russell Brand, Katy Perry, Donna Karan and others in support of a project to provide Transcendental Meditation instruction to 10,000 veterans and their families. The event will be on December 13 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

David Lynch Foundation spokesman Robert Roth: "We believe Operation Warrior Wellness full has great potential for treating post-traumatic stress syndrome. Transcendental Meditation isn't introspection or reliving the past; it affects the neurophysiology that underlies the disorder, eliminating rather than masking its symptoms."

The project was inspired by one of the last surviving  World War II fighter pilots, Jerry Yellin, 86, who says that Transcendental Meditation saved his life after 30 years of PTSD. Within weeks of learning the technique in 1975 his agitation,anger and restlessness began to dissipate. 

Now Yellin has joined forces with the David Lynch Foundation in response to the high numbers - estimated at 35% - of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans suffering from PTSD, most of whom do not receive adequate treatment.

"Drugs are costly and don't provide a cure," says Yellin. "Mental health professionals provide excellent care but it ... takes a long, long time. Sufferers of PTSD, and their loved ones, do not have that time. America does not have that time. We are in crisis mode."

"This is a tool to help them help themselves, not for just a month or two but forever."

Yellin will join other veterans, philanthropists and celebrities, many of whom have benefitted from Transcendental Meditation themselves, at the fundraising event in December. Clint Eastwood, a long-term meditator and supporter of veterans will be amongst those speaking.

Symptoms of PTSD include anxiety, hyper-vigilance, nightmares, flashbacks, insomnia, anger and withdrawal.

Read more at The Huffington Post