Ainslie Meares

Dr. Ainslie Meares (1910-1986), was an Australian psychiatrist who used meditation as a means of treatment of psychosomatic and psychoneurotic illnesses in the 1960s. Melbourne-based, he was also an international expert in the medical uses of hypnosis.

Meditation research
He initially developed an interest in meditation as a treatment for the psychological component of the pain. In time, he began research on the biological mechanisms of pain. Unconventionally for his field at the time, he visited India and Nepal in order to document the ways Eastern mystics or yogis influenced their perceptions through spiritual practices, particularly meditation.

In Nepal he met a famous wise man believed to be 134 years old. This man taught Meares a simple meditation technique that Meares applied in his approach to the treatment of pain, amongst other things, in cancer patients.

In 1976, he reported in the Medical Journal of Australia about a regression of cancer he attributed to intensive meditation. Meares would go on to write a number of books, including his best-seller Relief without Drugs.

Method
Meares' method included relaxation, emptying the mind and stillness. This approach to meditation reduced it to the most simple essence rather than classical meditations involving mechanics such as watching objects, using mantras, reflecting on spiritual concepts or other thought frameworks involving willpower.

His method was radical in its non-aligned, non-religious, reductive approach. As well, it was clearly a pioneering drug-free alternative to health and as well as being non-chemical it was non-mechanical. For Meares, "The key to our management of stress lies in those moments when our brain runs quietly in a way that restores harmony of function..." (Life Without Stress).

In Life Without Stress, he describes it this way, "In the meditation that I would advise you to practise there is no striving, no activity of brain function, just quietness, a stillness of effortless tranquility." For him, brain function meant the brain was engaged even when using classical ways of attention to the breath, visualisation or counting.

The letting-go approach encourages achieving stillness by simply letting go thoughts when they arise. By inviting stillness, at first in fragments, stillness increases until it becomes a continuous flow. He stressed the importance of being uncritical of oneself, and of not assessing the process. Meares used the term "just being" rather than being about something or otherwise engaging the mind, "We are seeking a form of relaxation which arises in the brain itself..."

In an undramatic way, he encouraged the meditator to just let the mind be still for anything from a mere ten minutes a day. By allowing the mind to "rest" the meditation would affect the flow in other areas of the body, the mind and in functioning in the outer world.

Influences
One well known patient was former athlete Australian Ian Gawler whose search for a cure for his own cancer took him far and wide, including the Philippines. Gawler won remission from the disease through hours of intensive meditation in sessions with Meares. Gawler now lectures widely and heads the Gawler Foundation offering meditational practices based on techniques from Meares and Émile Coué. Another is Pauline McKinnon therapist, author and initiator of the Life Development Centre in Melbourne with its emphasis on "stillness meditation" attributed to Dr. Meares, to reduce anxiety and alleviate anxiety-related states. McKinnon recovered from agoraphobia through her sessions with Meares before going on to become a therapist.

Partial bibliography

 * Relief without Drugs : How You Can Overcome Tension, Anxiety and Pain
 * The Wealth Within: Self-Help Through a System of Relaxing Meditation
 * Life Without Stress
 * The Introvert
 * The management of the anxious patient.
 * The hidden powers of leadership
 * Why be old? : how to avoid the psychological reactions of ageing
 * Strange places and simple truths.
 * Shapes of sanity : a study in the therapeutic use of modelling in the waking and hypnotic state.
 * ''Where magic lies.
 * Dialogue with youth
 * The medical interview; a study of clinically significant interpersonal reactions.