Doctor's orders: Cross your legs and say 'Om' - Interest in meditation grows with evidence it might reduce the brain's reaction to pain and increase pain tolerance.

Telling them to relax their bodies and concentrate on their breathing, author and meditation instructor Sharon Salzberg urged them to overcome distractions such as sounds, thoughts and emotions by coming back to the breath each time they found their minds wandering.

The goal, she said, was to still the mind. For the participants, all from UCLA's Mattel Children's Hospital Pediatric Pain Program and many unfamiliar with meditation, it was also an opportunity to observe, up close and personal, a technique being prescribed at the hospital to ease physical and emotional pain in their pediatric patients.

Salzberg, 55, was teaching the group Vipassana -- or mindfulness -- meditation, a centuries-old Buddhist practice she was instrumental in bringing to the U.S. after a four-year stay in India in the early 1970s. A cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass., Salzberg extols the benefits of a meditation practice, even if just for minutes a day. "It's a healing process," she said later. "A move toward integration."

It appears to work. In a new study, published in October in the journal Pain, Natalia Morone, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, tracked the effect of mindfulness meditation on chronic lower back pain in adults 65 and older. The randomized, controlled clinical trial found that the 37 people who participated in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program had significantly greater pain acceptance and physical function than a similar size control group. Subsequently, the control group took the same eight-week program and had similar results.

"When there is pain, the rest of the body tenses up," Salzberg said. "Then you have tension plus pain. Or there's judgment: 'I shouldn't be feeling this way.' Mindfulness allows us to see what the add-ons are and discover what the actual experience is right now."

Increasingly, doctors across the country are recommending meditation to treat pain, and some of the nation's top hospitals, including Stanford, Duke and NYU Medical Center, now offer meditation programs to pain patients.