Read “Faith, Healing: Is There a Proven Link?,” about the debate between Sloan and Harold Koenig, founding co-director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality, Theology and Health. The article is from the Nov. 25, 2003, Columbia Spectator.

Read a critique of the literature on religion, spirituality and health by Richard P. Sloan, director of the behavioral medicine program at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, N.Y.

Read about the “relaxation response” as defined by the father of mind-body medicine research, Dr. Herbert Benson.

Mind and Life Institute was created in 1987 to promote neuroscience research on the mind, Buddhism, health and meditation.

The White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, Calif., offers a Thanksgiving yoga retreat at its center in the mountains.

Diana Winston is the director of mindfulness education at the University of California, Los Angeles Semel Institute’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. She has taught mindfulness practices for more than 25 years and published Fully Present: The Science, Art and Practice of Mindfulness in 2010.

Assistants of meditation master S.N. Goenka regularly offer meditation courses for executives throughout the world.

Suzanne G. Farnham is founder of the Baltimore-based Listening Hearts Ministries, which designs and leads retreats for religious organizations and congregations around the country. Farnham is co-author of Listening Hearts: Discerning Call in Community (Morehouse Publishing, 1991) and she wrote Retreat Designs and Meditation Exercises (Morehouse Publishing, 1994), books widely used by groups of many denominations in religious retreats.