Studies show that out of 28 professions, lawyers are most likely to burn out.

Stress is linked to high blood pressure, chronic migraines, heart disease, depression, and anxiety among other health problems.

There are effective ways to master stress, however, and a growing number of lawyers are responding to this endemic health hazard by enrolling in stress management courses that feature meditation.

Ray Lopez, director of the Lawyer Assistance Program for the New York State Bar Association, is a strong advocate of using meditation to deal with stress.

“When you slow down for a short time on a regular basis, you reduce stress, which is helpful both physically and mentally. When people are stressed, they may think they can do a lot, but they’re limited — they’re impaired. That’s what lawyers have to realize. If you don’t take care of your health, you’re going to be undone.” Lopez wrote in a New York Law Journal article.

Harvard and others join lawyer meditation movement
A number of leading American law schools, including Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, are now offering meditation courses to their students in an effort to provide budding lawyers with tools to fight the stress they will face in their careers.

Retired California judge Ron Greenberg is also among the advocates of meditation for law students, lawyers, and judges. He gives presentations throughout the United States on topics such as “The benefits of meditation and how it can play a role in the student’s success in law school and beyond.”

He also stresses the connection between meditation and mediation and how each influences the other.

In a May 2006 Legal Times article, Greenberg’s colleague, Charles Halpern of UC Berkley, said, “meditation helps judges achieve empathy.”

In an SFGate.com article titled “Zen and the Art of Lawyering,” Professor Leonard Riskin of the University of Missouri at Columbia School of Law said: “I believe that mindfulness can help mediators and other dispute resolution professionals feel better, get more satisfaction out of the work, and do a better job for their clients.”

Riskin’s work has had a snowball effect since the Harvard Negotiation Law Review published his article, “The Contemplative Lawyer: On the Potential Contributions of Mindfulness Meditation to Law Students, Lawyers and Their Clients.”

The article resulted in several prestigious law firms in Boston, including Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP, offering on-site courses in mindfulness meditation.

Long Island lawyer Arnie Hertz meditates 15 to 60 minutes every day. He says it reduces and effectively channels the emotionally charged feelings his clients feel for their adversaries.

“Rather than being a gladiator for someone’s heightened emotions, there’s a more effective way of lawyering: Help your client get centered, and get them to look at their long-term life interests away from the immediate problem they’re facing,” he told SFGate.com.

Stress, health, addiction, and lawyers
Lawyers are always switched on. They require almost superhuman energy to stay focused and on their game. Nothing short of utmost dedication to the firm and the client is expected of the practising lawyer.

Stress creates cortisol, which ramps up the heart rate and blood pressure. If stress is chronic, and the body is in an almost constant “hyper” state, the health of the individual declines.

High blood pressure, chronic migraines, heart disease, depression, anxiety, and other health problems then make their unwelcome appearances.

Some lawyers deal with stress by self-medicating, drinking too much, or using drugs. Some drink too much coffee or smoke too many cigarettes. These activities mask the problem and compound it with addiction.

Legal Business recently published a survey which concluded that throughout the United Kingdom, alcohol abuse was “endemic” and the use of hard drugs such as cocaine was “becoming more prevalent, particularly in big city law firms.”

The same survey said cocaine abuse is common on the job and law partners even admit to using it with their clients in basement poker games.

Lawyers particularly vulnerable to stress
Lawyers are natural-born perfectionists and this is where the problem begins. If the practice of one’s vocation requires perfection there is a lot of opportunity for disappointment because perfection is impossible.

Lawyers work on billable hours, so each minute is important, and many litigators are overloaded with work. Firms push their lawyers to accrue as many hours as possible in their day, resulting in crushing 14-hour marathon workdays.

Lawyers are also encouraged to compete with their colleagues to get more clients. This further increases stress levels.

The result is an exhausting treadmill that many find difficult to stay on without some form of relief — relief that may in fact compound the problem.

Lawyers by their nature are required to be skeptical and tend to view the world negatively. Also, they are required to be competitive and ruthless in court. If they cannot learn to mitigate the effects of — and sometimes turn off — these professional mindsets and attitudes, they risk the danger of illness, or worse.

In his book Stress Management for Lawyers: How to Increase Personal and Professional Satisfaction in the Law, Dr. Amiram Elwork provides the following statistics:
• 80% of lawyers report high stress in general
• 90% report stress increasing yearly
• 20 to 55% are dissatisfied with their work
• 37% are chronically depressed, with symptoms such as loss of appetite, lethargy and sleep disorders
• 25% experience chronic loneliness
• 40 to 75% of disciplinary actions are against lawyers who are chemically dependent or mentally ill
• Lawyers as a group experience more than average suicides among professionals, and 11% report having experienced suicidal ideation one or two times per month in the past year
• 20 to 30% of lawyers experience alcohol or drug abuse problems.

Elwork points out that most relationship, marriage, and friendship problems result from limited time availability and the effects of anxiety or depression. He adds that many lawyers take their work attitude, demeanor, and language home, where it does not fit.

He observes that even medium levels of chronic stress are harmful to effectiveness in meeting deadlines, detecting problems, and creating solutions.

Can meditation help a lawyer become a better litigator?
David Pfalzgraf of the Buffalo, N.Y., law firm Renda Pares & Pfalzgraf attests to the benefits of meditation. He told the National Law Journal, “Four of our firm’s seven lawyers take part in weekly meditation sessions.”

He also said his firm’s productivity has increased dramatically since the practice of meditation was introduced five years ago.

Lawyers who practise meditation report they have more energy and stamina, thereby improving their personal performance in court. Meditation helps lower blood pressure, increases focus, and helps practitioners see the world differently.

Linda Lazarus is a Washington, D.C., mediation lawyer who teaches group meditation. She started the D.C. Area Contemplative Law Group, which consists of 40 to 50 lawyers who meet monthly to help themselves find balance in their lives.

Lazarus told Legal Times, “You meditate because it makes you better. You change habitually negative behaviors. You stop negative habits and develop positive ones.”

Chi Kung meditation for lawyers
For more than 15 years, I have practised and taught Chi Kung meditation, an ancient Chinese form of controlled body movement, breathing, and mental concentration techniques. Like the Buddhist-inspired “mindfulness meditation” and other major contemplative traditions, Chi Kung emphasizes being in the moment by clearing the mind of thoughts.

Chi Kung meditation enables you to reside more frequently in the present moment, without aversion, commentary, or judgment. It frees you to observe life without “getting caught in the commentary.”

I have seen many of my students and others transform their personal and professional lives through Chi Kung. Virtually every regular practitioner reports a reduction in stress, improved sleep, enhanced energy and focus, and reduced blood pressure.

Doctors in China use it daily. However, in order to convince more Western doctors and others of Chi Kung’s clear medical and general health benefits, more Western-style scientific studies now need to be done and widely publicized. But these are beginning to appear.

Canadian lawyers might want to consider law professor Halpern’s words. He teaches Chi Kung to lawyers and judges, and says: “Developing a meditative perspective helps us practise law. It helps us be more creative and more open to new solutions.”

Law firms in Canada should consider setting up Chi Kung and other types of meditation programs in-house for the bottom-line benefits alone. Who knows what a healthier, more focused, and energetic law firm might achieve, with fewer burnouts, reduced absenteeism and turnover, and greater peace of mind among its competitive advantages?

Craig Cormack of Rising Tao Integrative Health is a Chi Kung meditation master, senior Tai Chi instructor, and registered Chinese massotherapist based in Montreal. He is a consultant at the McGill University Sports Medicine Clinic and president of l’Association de massage chinois Tuina du Québec. Contact him at www.risingtao.ca

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There are already so many things you’re forced to do at work. Drink subpar coffee as a break from mundane chores. Come up with creative ways to cut costs. And now your boss wants you to meditate?

Meditation has been gaining a slow and steady fan base in financial and professional environments as a way to combat the ravaging physical and psychological impacts of stress.

Maria Gonzalez is the founder and president of Argonauta Strategic Alliances Consulting, a company that integrates mindfulness meditation with the development of business strategy and strategic alliances. When she started meditating 17 years ago, she found that it made her far more effective at work. “You could be calm when everyone else wasn’t, and you could concentrate,” she says. “That meant you could do things much more quickly.”

Ms. Gonzalez offers one-on-one coaching and group sessions, and her business credentials — including teaching stints at McGill University and articles published in The McKinsey Quarterly — help quell concerns about flakiness. Because mindfulness meditation teaches the practitioner to focus on the moment, students often find that they are more calm, more efficient, able to listen more effectively and able to dismiss distractions, casual slights and irritations.

She says that the recent economic flux has increased interest in her practices. “People are really stressed and not knowing where this is going,” she says. “The people I’ve been working with, like the investment bankers who have been meditating for the last few years, are responding really differently.”

Students of Ms. Gonzalez’s practices are happy to offer testimonials about how the incorporation of meditative practices has improved their lives and allowed them to eliminate personal and professional clutter. Lesley Parrott, a consultant and keynote speaker, says that since she began meditating two years ago things have become more clear, calm and directed. “When I start something, I can finish it,” she says. “One’s own energy is so much more under control. You very quickly learn that it can get you into a really nice space [and] it’s like another sense kicks in.”

Barbara Symmons, a psychotherapist and life coach who has been meditating for more than a decade, put her first mindfulness meditation class together five years ago for a group of female managers at the Ministry of Natural Resources in Peterborough, Ont., who were feeling the stress of their work environment. “They were trained as scientists and they had to manage men who liked huntin’, fishin’ and shootin’,” Ms. Symmons says. The group responded quickly to the practice; blood pressures dropped and sleeping habits improved.

Practising mindfulness meditation doesn’t require much in the way of paraphernalia. Ms. Gonzalez simply introduces students to formal practice, the 10 minutes a day of deliberate meditation that can be done at your desk, on a treadmill or lying on your floor at home. It’s a relaxation of the body that encourages the mind to follow.

Ms. Symmons says that the classic introduction to mindfulness meditation is to hand a student a raisin and have her smell it, touch it, put it in her mouth and then wait a whole minute before swallowing it. “That is a visceral, concrete demonstration of slowing down,” she says.

Gradually, the process becomes instinctual and encompassing, and students find that they’re able to apply it when sitting in a meeting or interviewing for a job. Ms. Symmons is currently coaching a senior partner in a law firm who is hoping to accomplish some degree of work-life balance.

“When she’s at work, she’s at work; when she’s at home, she’s at home; and when she’s on the streetcar in between, she’s meditating,” she says. “We can’t change the law firm and we can’t change the demands that are put on her and we can’t change her family situation, but we can help her to manage it better,” she says.

“It’s really just about doing what you’re doing more effectively,” Ms. Gonzalez says. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a surgeon or a journalist or a businessperson or a student.”

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The patient sat with his eyes closed, submerged in the rhythm of his own breathing, and after a while noticed that he was thinking about his troubled relationship with his father.

“I was able to be there, present for the pain,” he said, when the meditation session ended. “To just let it be what it was, without thinking it through.”

The therapist nodded.

“Acceptance is what it was,” he continued. “Just letting it be. Not trying to change anything.”

“That’s it,” the therapist said. “That’s it, and that’s big.”

This exercise in focused awareness and mental catch-and-release of emotions has become perhaps the most popular new psychotherapy technique of the past decade. Mindfulness meditation, as it is called, is rooted in the teachings of a fifth-century B.C. Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha. It is catching the attention of talk therapists of all stripes, including academic researchers, Freudian analysts in private practice and skeptics who see all the hallmarks of another fad.

For years, psychotherapists have worked to relieve suffering by reframing the content of patients’ thoughts, directly altering behavior or helping people gain insight into the subconscious sources of their despair and anxiety. The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process — and ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words cannot reach. “The interest in this has just taken off,” said Zindel Segal, a psychologist at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where the above group therapy session was taped. “And I think a big part of it is that more and more therapists are practicing some form of contemplation themselves and want to bring that into therapy.”

At workshops and conferences across the country, students, counselors and psychologists in private practice throng lectures on mindfulness. The National Institutes of Health is financing more than 50 studies testing mindfulness techniques, up from 3 in 2000, to help relieve stress, soothe addictive cravings, improve attention, lift despair and reduce hot flashes.

Some proponents say Buddha’s arrival in psychotherapy signals a broader opening in the culture at large — a way to access deeper healing, a hidden path revealed.

Yet so far, the evidence that mindfulness meditation helps relieve psychiatric symptoms is thin, and in some cases, it may make people worse, some studies suggest. Many researchers now worry that the enthusiasm for Buddhist practice will run so far ahead of the science that this promising psychological tool could turn into another fad.

“I’m very open to the possibility that this approach could be effective, and it certainly should be studied,” said Scott Lilienfeld, a psychology professor at Emory. “What concerns me is the hype, the talk about changing the world, this allure of the guru that the field of psychotherapy has a tendency to cultivate.”

Buddhist meditation came to psychotherapy from mainstream academic medicine. In the 1970s, a graduate student in molecular biology, Jon Kabat-Zinn, intrigued by Buddhist ideas, adapted a version of its meditative practice that could be easily learned and studied. It was by design a secular version, extracted like a gemstone from the many-layered foundation of Buddhist teaching, which has sprouted a wide variety of sects and spiritual practices and attracted 350 million adherents worldwide.

In transcendental meditation and other types of meditation, practitioners seek to transcend or “lose” themselves. The goal of mindfulness meditation was different, to foster an awareness of every sensation as it unfolds in the moment.

Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught the practice to people suffering from chronic pain at the University of Massachusetts medical school. In the 1980s he published a series of studies demonstrating that two-hour courses, given once a week for eight weeks, reduced chronic pain more effectively than treatment as usual.

Word spread, discreetly at first. “I think that back then, other researchers had to be very careful when they talked about this, because they didn’t want to be seen as New Age weirdos,” Dr. Kabat-Zinn, now a professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Massachusetts, said in an interview. “So they didn’t call it mindfulness or meditation. “After a while, we put enough studies out there that people became more comfortable with it.”

One person who noticed early on was Marsha Linehan, a psychologist at the University of Washington who was trying to treat deeply troubled patients with histories of suicidal behavior. “Trying to treat these patients with some change-based behavior therapy just made them worse, not better,” Dr. Linehan said in an interview. “With the really hard stuff, you need something else, something that allows people to tolerate these very strong emotions.”

In the 1990s, Dr. Linehan published a series of studies finding that a therapy that incorporated Zen Buddhist mindfulness, “radical acceptance,” practiced by therapist and patient significantly cut the risk of hospitalization and suicide attempts in the high-risk patients.

Finally, in 2000, a group of researchers including Dr. Segal in Toronto, J. Mark G. Williams at the University of Wales and John D. Teasdale at the Medical Research Council in England published a study that found that eight weekly sessions of mindfulness halved the rate of relapse in people with three or more episodes of depression.

With Dr. Kabat-Zinn, they wrote a popular book, “The Mindful Way Through Depression.” Psychotherapists’ curiosity about mindfulness, once tentative, turned into “this feeding frenzy, of sorts, that we have going on now,” Dr. Kabat-Zinn said.

Mindfulness meditation is easy to describe. Sit in a comfortable position, eyes closed, preferably with the back upright and unsupported. Relax and take note of body sensations, sounds and moods. Notice them without judgment. Let the mind settle into the rhythm of breathing. If it wanders (and it will), gently redirect attention to the breath. Stay with it for at least 10 minutes.

After mastering control of attention, some therapists say, a person can turn, mentally, to face a threatening or troubling thought — about, say, a strained relationship with a parent — and learn simply to endure the anger or sadness and let it pass, without lapsing into rumination or trying to change the feeling, a move that often backfires.

One woman, a doctor who had been in therapy for years to manage bouts of disabling anxiety, recently began seeing Gaea Logan, a therapist in Austin, Tex., who incorporates mindfulness meditation into her practice. This patient had plenty to worry about, including a mentally ill child, a divorce and what she described as a “harsh internal voice,” Ms. Logan said.

After practicing mindfulness meditation, she continued to feel anxious at times but told Ms. Logan, “I can stop and observe my feelings and thoughts and have compassion for myself.”

Steven Hayes, a psychologist at the University of Nevada at Reno, has developed a talk therapy called Acceptance Commitment Therapy, or ACT, based on a similar, Buddha-like effort to move beyond language to change fundamental psychological processes.

“It’s a shift from having our mental health defined by the content of our thoughts,” Dr. Hayes said, “to having it defined by our relationship to that content — and changing that relationship by sitting with, noticing and becoming disentangled from our definition of ourselves.”

For all these hopeful signs, the science behind mindfulness is in its infancy. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which researches health practices, last year published a comprehensive review of meditation studies, including T.M., Zen and mindfulness practice, for a wide variety of physical and mental problems. The study found that over all, the research was too sketchy to draw conclusions.

A recent review by Canadian researchers, focusing specifically on mindfulness meditation, concluded that it did “not have a reliable effect on depression and anxiety.”

Therapists who incorporate mindfulness practices do not agree when the meditation is most useful, either. Some say Buddhist meditation is most useful for patients with moderate emotional problems. Others, like Dr. Linehan, insist that patients in severe mental distress are the best candidates for mindfulness.

A case in point is mindfulness-based therapy to prevent a relapse into depression. The treatment significantly reduced the risk of relapse in people who have had three or more episodes of depression. But it may have had the opposite effect on people who had one or two previous episodes, two studies suggest.

The mindfulness treatment “may be contraindicated for this group of patients,” S. Helen Ma and Dr. Teasdale of the Medical Research Council concluded in a 2004 study of the therapy.

Since mindfulness meditation may have different effects on different mental struggles, the challenge for its proponents will be to specify where it is most effective — and soon, given how popular the practice is becoming.

The question, said Linda Barnes, an associate professor of family medicine and pediatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine, is not whether mindfulness meditation will become a sophisticated therapeutic technique or lapse into self-help cliché.

“The answer to that question is yes to both,” Dr. Barnes said.

The real issue, most researchers agree, is whether the science will keep pace and help people distinguish the mindful variety from the mindless.

A variety of meditative practices have been studied by Western researchers for their effects on mental and physical health.

Tai Chi
An active exercise, sometimes called moving meditation, involving extremely slow, continuous movement and extreme concentration. The movements are to balance the vital energy of the body but have no religious significance.

Studies are mixed, some finding it can reduce blood pressure in patients, and others finding no effect. There is some evidence that it can help elderly people improve balance.

Transcendental Meditation
Meditators sit comfortably, eyes closed, and breathe naturally. They repeat and concentrate on the mantra, a word or sound chosen by the instructor to achieve state of deep, transcendent absorption. Practitioners “lose” themselves, untouched by day-to-day concerns. Studies suggest it can reduce blood pressure in some patients.

Mindfulness Meditation
Practitioners find a comfortable position, close the eyes and focus first on breathing, passively observing it. If a stray thought or emotion enters the mind, they allow it to pass and return attention to the breath. The aim is to achieve focused awareness on what is happening moment to moment.

Studies find that it can help manage chronic pain. The findings are mixed on substance abuse. Two trials suggest that it can cut the rate of relapse in people who have had three or more bouts of depression.

Yoga
Enhanced awareness through breathing techniques and specific postures. Schools vary widely, aiming to achieve total absorption in the present and a release from ordinary thoughts. Studies are mixed, but evidence shows it can reduce stress.