For many patients struggling with anxiety, high blood pressure and other ailments, one prescription is becoming almost routine: Breathe deeply and meditate.

But Jon Spiegel, a clinical psychologist who will teach a continuing education course on meditation for psychologists and social workers at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary this fall, worries that health professionals have been too quick to rip meditation from its religious contexts. He will teach clinicians how to use meditation in their practices, while knowing and respecting the traditions it arises from.

"We need to be careful not to desacralize meditation," Spiegel said. "The health benefits are very important to understand, but they are not the central meaning of these practices."

Meditation encompasses a wide variety of practices aimed at quieting the mind and the body to transcend normal patterns and reactions. Spiegel will introduce it from a range of traditions, including Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Jain and Taoist.

The most recent book by the seminal researcher on meditation and health, Harvard University's Herbert Benson, indicates that patients who practice meditation for health reasons often report religious experiences, often in the form of sensing a closeness to God or some other spiritual force.

"You and I might think this is like saying, 'If you go swimming, you're going to get wet,' " Spiegel said. "But here they were, trying to be good scientists and take meditation out of a religious context. What they found is that when people begin a religious practice, they have a religious experience."

Because studies show that mental health professionals tend to be far less religious than the American public as a whole, Spiegel believed it was important to introduce them not only to relaxation techniques, but to the most deeply held beliefs of their clients.

"My goal here is not to turn clinicians into believers of any sort. But they should at least be informed and educated about what the vast majority of their patient population is going to be like, so they can be better clinicians," Spiegel said.

"A psychologist leaving this course can go into a hospital or clinic and actually have a method to use, but won't be doing it in a way that says this is just another blood pressure cuff. They will be doing it with some understanding of how profoundly important this is to so many people around the globe."

Participants in the course will receive instruction in various forms and clinical uses of meditation. Spiegel does not think meditation should necessarily replace medication or behavioral therapy for problems such as depression or anxiety, but that it can be a useful adjunct, he said.

"For someone who is having a very hard time sleeping, they've gone through a traumatic loss or divorce, or they have a hard time getting on an airplane or being in public or making a speech -- in the midst of their terrible feelings, if they have learned the basic meditation and relaxation skills, they can often get immediate relief," he said.

Although he teaches at a Presbyterian seminary, Spiegel, 55, is Jewish, with a long-standing interest in Eastern meditation.

In 1967, he began to study in Asia with Jain, Sikh, Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist teachers. He was struck by parallels between what he experienced among holy men and what he encountered in seven years of work with clinical hypnosis.

His supervisors "were more interested in 'Oh boy, this works!' '' he said. "But I was more philosophically interested in what does this tell us about the nature of being human, that when we reach this place of quietude we begin to have these experiences of life's meaning and depth."

From 1980 to 1985, he studied with the late Joseph Campbell, famed for his work on mythology and the human psyche. He also did two years of graduate studies in religion at the University of Pittsburgh. And since 1986, Spiegel has been a student of Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, who brought a fusion of mysticism and liberal Judaism to the Jewish Renewal Movement.

Spiegel was quick to pay attention when other clinicians documented a correlation between meditation, prayer and improved health. There have been more than 1,000 studies since. Among the more recent, researchers at the University of Wisconsin reported that brain scans showed that meditation can stimulate areas in the brain related to positive emotions and can affect immune function.

Where the "psy" professions once disdained faith as a neurosis unto itself, respected medical schools now have centers to explore the relationship between spirituality and health. Benson, whose latest book is "Beyond the Relaxation Response," heads the Mind/Body Institute at Harvard.

Although he prefers to stick to the science rather than the theology of meditation, Andrew Koffmann, director of the Clinical Psychology Center at Pitt, has seen enough empirical evidence of its benefits to include it in course work for graduate students in clinical psychology.

"People's private religious belief is their own," Koffmann said. "The point is that there is increasing evidence that meditation practices can be helpful in psychotherapy."

On the other hand, the Rev. Kyoki Roberts, head priest of the Zen Center of Pittsburgh in Bell Acres, sees little relationship between her tradition and the relaxation techniques that health professionals offer.

She teaches Zazen, which involves "just sitting and carefully attending to the present moment. Now, the present moment sometimes means that it's very uneasy or sad or angry or joyful. So it's not a relaxation technique," she said.

But she does not criticize the efforts of the clinicians, and has respect for Spiegel.

"I think Jon knows as much about this as anybody, and that he is using some techniques to calm and ease the mind and body in such a way that it helps people through difficult times," she said.

Dr. Robert Marin, associate professor of psychiatry at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, has approached meditation from both the therapeutic and Buddhist perspective. Because meditation is flexible, he does not believe the two contradict each other.

"A very powerful concept for understanding the nature of psychological stress is that it comes from being psychologically caught in the past or hooked into the future. If you help people unhook themselves from the past and from the future, they can sit, literally and figuratively, more comfortably in the present," Marin said.

"Some people get introduced to meditation simply as a way to relax, and that provides a sense of comfort and well-being and improved symptoms. But among people who find that useful, there will be some who discover and recognize that the kind of experience they have for themselves in this state does have the potential for cutting through and transcending their everyday way of looking at things. In that way, it does seem to be a vehicle for what might be termed spiritual experience."

The course, Meditation and Its Clinical Application, will start tomorrow and end Nov. 17. Fees range from $120 to $170 depending on whether clinical sessions are included and what continuing education credits the student is seeking. For more information, call the seminary at 412-362-5610, ext. 2196, or Spiegel at 412-362-7955