Beyond fight and flight lies another option for people in stressful jobs like policing.

Its easy, free and anyone can do it pretty much anywhere: Meditation.

All it requires is a few minutes spent concentrating on breaths coming into the body, then exhaled.

Instructor Billy Rosenbeck says concentrating on something the body does automatically takes the mind away from negative thoughts for a few moments and to a more serene place.

Meditation allows the body to step back from the brink, calm itself and return to its non-threatened state.

What it does is it takes your body out of the stress response to its relaxation response, to bring the body into homeostasis, Rosenbeck said.

Rosenbeck has created a four-week how to on meditation for law enforcement professionals called The Warriors Code: Meditation in Law Enforcement. In February, Easthampton police officers, the Hampden County Sheriffs Department and the Hampshire County Sheriffs Department personnel, as well as dispatchers, will learn how to control their own responses to stress.

Rosenbecks introduction of meditation and mindfulness came in the form of a life change. An abrupt change in his emotional state set him in search for something. He didnt know what.

I was pretty much a happy person for a long time until it stopped, he said. A meditation app on his phone called Headspace brought him to meditation.

I would meditate for 10 minutes a day, he said. It was something I needed for myself.

What started as a personal practice blossomed into a life change. He now teaches meditation and mindfulness in classes across Western Massachusetts and is hooking up with academic, corporate, state and municipal agencies to help bring mindfulness training to those who need it. He is available through his website, themellowelephant.com.

For the average cop, work is stressful. Cops are more likely to die from suicide than in the line of duty. They have five times higher rates of depression than the general population and nine to 10 times the rate of PTSD.

The problem stems from the bodys fight or flight reaction that anyone who finds themselves in confrontational situations must deal with.

They are awash in a wave of chemicals their brain sends out when scared or threatened.

It is in the amygdala, part of the brains limbic system. When you are faced with a particularly stressful or unpredictable situation, the brain is going to react in a way that keeps the organism safe, said Rosenbeck.

For police officers, the job can be very predictable, until it is not. A situation, a call comes in and adrenaline is going to spike, and fight or flight is going to kick in. Stress hormones like cortisol get released, which is good for the moment, but lingers around for a while afterward. If there is no process for releasing those stress chemicals, it can be damaging to the body and the brain over the long run.

There is a process, Rosenbeck said.

The basic idea is to bring meditation and mindfulness to places you might not expect to find them, he said. Anyone can come to the presentation. Even if the whole department doesnt want to come, thats OK. Whoever wants to can come.

This is not the first time Rosenbeck has worked with police officers. Easthampton Mental Health and Wellness Coordinator Emma Reilly brought him on board when she was searching for wellness programs for the police and decided to include meditation.

I had surveyed the police force earlier about things that would be interesting to them, and mindfulness and meditation came up. I was surprised but more (officers) than I expected were interested, she said.

After she heard from an officer who knew Rosenbeck, she said it was a natural choice.

We have interest, and we have an instructor, she said. We just put the two together.

Rosenbeck has done preliminary presentations for the department, and some officers find meditation helpful, if initially a little off-putting.

Sgt. Kyle Gribi said he was not exactly open to the idea when it was proposed. I thought it was kind of goofy, he said. I didnt see the benefit right off.

He went to that first presentation dragging his feet. I promised Emma I would go, and I did, he said. I really didnt want to.

Gribi said Rosenbeck put meditation into a perspective he could understand.

Its not all Kumbaya or anything like that, he said, laughing. He talked about stress and how we might be dealing with it, how we emotionally react to things.

Controlling his breathing, and keeping negative thoughts at bay, helped Gribi find a path to relaxation.

It allows me to disconnect from what I think about some things I am dealing with, he said. It helps me shut off part of my brain for a little bit shut my brain down and just chill out for a little bit.

That, Rosenbeck said, is the natural state of relaxation in which we best operate.

Research has measured how the body reacts to long-term exposure to stress and how meditation can reverse some of those effects.

Sarah Lazar, a researcher with the Harvard Brain Initiative, demonstrated that abnormal physical reactions in the brain, caused by prolonged stress and anxiety, can be reversed through meditation and mindfulness.

The Sarah Lazar studies found there are structural changes that take place in the brain in just a few weeks of meditation, Rosenbeck said. CAT scans have shown that the amygdala, where anxiety and stress hormones are triggered, gets smaller while the frontal cortex with focus, learning, memory and emotional integration grows.

Top athletes use mindfulness as a means of improving their performance.

Rosenbeck said the first writings on meditation come from the Bhagavad Gita and the warrior Satria. In Japan, the samurai, steeped in the code of Bushido, practiced meditation and mindfulness. In all the martial arts, meditation and mindfulness help train the mind to be able to pick up a weapon, and to know when to act and when not to.

In all these often hyper-masculine arenas, we think of meditation as the antithesis of police work or combat or whatever, Rosenbeck said. But it has always been there.

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How meditation and mindfulness can bring healing for stressed cops - MassLive.com