I kid you not, I was in Westmed Health Groups offices the other day and the seat on the right is the new single seat size to accommodate the knock on effect of the epidemic that’s with us now. Indeed, as I took the BX7 bus from Riverdale to the A train at W207 last night, I sat in a three seat row with a large lady in the middle seat of such proportions that I couldn’t squeeze in to the seat on either side of her. How much will this cost just to refit the buses, the planes, let alone the health costs of coping with the illness and early death of these poor souls.

HealthCorps and the efforts their valiant coordinators are making is something the nation should be focussing on right now.

See what Dr Oz said in New York this week on HealthCorps Peer Group Mentoring Approach:

  Dr. Oz spoke about HealthCorps on Thursday in New York City.

When he’s not operating on patients, hosting a talk show or authoring books, Dr. Mehmet Oz devotes his time to his charity, HealthCorps, a Peace Corps-like program that sends college grads into high schools to mentor students on health and well-being. We spoke with Dr. Oz at a reception celebrating Evamor water’s partnership with HealthCorps, which will fund his mentoring program in additional schools across the U.S.

Why is peer-to-peer mentoring the right approach to take to teach kids about their health?
Well, part of it is because I have kids. I was asked by their school to give a talk to them once about 10 years ago, and they seemed sort of bored but I gave the talk anyway. The next day, as I got to the hospital, I had probably a dozen phone calls from corporate executives, lawyers [and] other doctors saying their kids had come home that night and had told them things like “If you have a piece of bread, it’s like having a candy bar.” And it began a process in my mind: If we can get these kids to talk with each other in a way that makes it cool to push back against your parents, they’ll do it. I’m not the one to deliver that message, but I can get college kids to do it. I was working a lot with Timmy Shriver and Maria Shriver, and their father, Sargent, started the Peace Corps, so I put the two experiences together. I said, “You know what? We can create an organization where we use the same kind of enthusiastic energy that young college graduates have, put them back in schools around the country and allow for that unique experience when a 21-year-old talks to a 17-year-old.” I’m not the right person to deliver the message, but I can give the 21-year-old the information they need to make it happen. That was the foundation of the concept. And I think the best way of scaling a program, inexpensively building it and touching a lot of lives — mentoring is the way to go. These volunteers are able to go out and do a lot of good. And they only do it for a couple years — they go off to med school or whatever they want to do in life — but it gives them two years of really great experience and it gives us two years of their service, which is hugely valuable.

What are your goals for the program, and what are you doing to reach them?

I want to have HealthCorps schools in every major city in America, and I want to have them in every state. We may not be in every school, and I think one of the things we’re learning is that we can develop [the] best practices from the many schools we’re in that other schools can adopt and begin to use in their own programs. We’re gonna call it HealthCorps University. So either you’ll have one of my volunteers in your school who will teach your kids about health,  and [for] anybody else, health teachers can take the syllabus and use it on their own. It’s written in a way that’s very accessible to high schoolers, and it’s free, so it takes away a lot of the obstacles to implementing it.

How can parents get involved?
The most important thing for parents to do is to get their kids to either use the website and the content on it or, more importantly, talk to their school systems about whether they can have a HealthCorps program there. What makes the school systems great is the teachers and the parents collaborating. We have wonderful programs that we have started primarily because parents went to schools and said, “I see this program, I want to have it.” And then [they] find some kind of a hybrid program that’s affordable and works.

This morning, for day two of the HealthCorps Professional Development Training, Alan Wherry led the fifty plus team of new and old coordinators, head office and the management team in a 7.45 am meditation. Today, for the benefit of the new batch of coordinators, he explained and demonstrated two of the three techniques we teach students in high schools thanks to invitations from HealthCorps coordinators. Stage One, being able to be in thoughtless awareness i.e. being in the present. Stage Two, being able to assess the state of the subtle energy channels in the spine and correcting imbalances – so after a couple of minutes meditation, we balanced the left and right channels then completed the meditation.

Alan then spoke briefly about how meditation inculcates many of the core HealthCorps values for example, respect. You cannot respect others unless you respect yourself and meditation enables one to go deep inside and reach the core of our being. When you touch that, self respect automatically follows. Mental resilience? Well of course there are many ways to develop this quality, but in a work experience going back 43 years, meditation gives you the inner toughness to keep trying until you succeed.

Alan finished by saying that anything of value requires effort and practice to learn, and meditation is no different in this regard. The miracle is that so many students get it so easily, but to become a master of the three techniques needs effort and practice. Professionalism he noted, by definition, is doing your best work when you don’t feel like it.

This morning saw the beginning of the latest HeatlhCorps PD program which will run for three days in New York. At each of the days, the program begins at 7.45 am with a 15 minute Sahaja Meditation. There are now 53 coordinators, including about 11 attending for the first time, from the Bay area and Seattle. None of these people had ever meditated before.

We began with a show of hands.

How many think that meditation is either of no interest to them, or, a complete waste of time? About three people raised their hands.

How many are open-minded to the possibilities of meditation but haven’t as yet reached a clear cut opinion? About half the group raised their hands.

How many know from their own personal experience and from what they’ve seen from students, that Sahaja Meditation is a valuable practice? The rest of the group raised their hands, including Juan Brea, the COO of HealthCorps and Dr. Shawn Hayes from Sacramento CA, the new director of education and research.

Right now, HealthCorps will double to around 100 coordinators within a year and that’ll be it. They can’t see how their peer-mentoring program which sets out to deal with childhood obesity can grow bigger than that. There are 26,000 public high schools and it isn’t possible or practical to cover them all with this program.

Did you know that at the current rates in the growth of childhood obesity, the ensuing costs will bankrupt the USA? That’s the scale of the epidemic we are facing.

However, a HealthCorps university will be started too, which will produce a curriculum, serious academic research programs and the expertise that will enable any school to run their own HealthCorps program. As things stand, Sahaja Meditation will be part of this.

HealthCorps are partnering with any group or institution that shares their common goals and are now talking to 300 such bodies.

What are the core values of HealthCorps?

Professionalism

Respect

Trust

Mental resilience

Team play

Balance

Sustainability

it’s worth noting how many of these will be developed through the practice of Sahaja Meditation.

In the break between presentations, several coordinators came up to say hello. Joe Blasher from Portland, Oregon, because we have no one in Portland who’s free to participate in HealthCorps activity, has been running his own Sahaja Meditation programs and his students love it. Adler Dorvilus from Miami, Florida was full of praise for Louisa Upadhya, Peter Simone and one other yogi who’s names he couldn’t recall, who recently ran a Sahaja stall in a high traffic area of a busy health fair. Adler said it’s quite a tough school  and his students loved Sahaj and our three people, and were incredibly impressed by Peter, who is a martial arts professional. And, at Aviation HS in LIC, New York, unbeknown to any of us, 140 students have been meditating in one of the school clubs as a result of programs run there by Joan Burress. The CFO of HealthCorps, Fernando, asked for details of the W34st meeting because he wants to start attending programs there.

So far, none of the new coordinators have asked for our help in schools, hardly surprising given they’ve never previously had exposure to Sahaja meditation and hopefully that will now change. However, there is a noticeable decline in the overall requests coming in for regular meditation activity. This will not be helped by the fact that dues to lack of numbers we are now turning down requests for help, for example, Joan and Roni Eldridge are going to Brazil for three weeks and no one can step in here in New York to run the program in Jamaica, Queens.

Let’s hope more of us will be able to step up to the plate, after all, in addition to going deeper, what else can we do better than spreading Sahaj?