Every once in a while you’ll read a mainstream media piece paying homage to science’s “acceptance” of the validity of meditation and yogic practices. You’ll see headlines like: Science Proves Meditation Really Calms Stress!, as if this were groundbreaking news to practitioners. The very act of “validity” is counterintuitive to people who have transformed their lives due to these techniques, and one feels it almost necessary to educate these doctors that Asian healing systems have long been approached as a “science,” without the need of the machineries of modernity.

Yet I understand the argument: people feel reassured knowing science has “proven” something. And just because we can scan beta waves and tap into our frontal cortex, this does not dispel the mystery of meditation — in some ways, it solidifies it. I just find the distance between experimenting and experiencing humorous. Those who feel it, as Bob Marley used to say, know.

Of all the initiatives that have made an impact on mainstream America, one of the most worthwhile is Donna Karan’s Urban Zen Foundation. After Karan’s husband died of cancer in 2001, she became disappointed and disillusioned with the Western medical approach, which isolates disease from the rest of the body. This sort of specialization is common; we look at a very small and specific surface area of the body, not realizing that it is one body with many parts, not many parts that happen to form one body. That is an important distinction, and so Karan teamed up with British designer Sonja Nuttall to, among other things, “advance the journey of healthcare.”

When I read this NY Times piece about an $850,000 donation to the cancer department at New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center, I was further inspired. As the piece states, “Instead of just letting a celebrated donor adopt a hospital wing, renovate it and have her name embossed on a plaque, the Karan-Beth Israel project will have a celebrated donor turn a hospital into a testing ground for a trendy, medically controversial notion: that yoga, meditation and aromatherapy can enhance regimens of chemotherapy and radiation.”

Take out the “trendy” part — that’s just the ignorance of the journalist who writes with a need to “relate” the situation to the public. And I’m not too sure where the controversy is, considering no one (save a few Himalayan ascetics who believe that yoga can reverse the effects of cancer within hours) states that the disciplines of yoga and meditation can cure anything. But are they useful in calming the entire being, giving focus and clarity to the mind while helping the body remain youthful and healthy? I don’t think anyone who practices pranayama and asana would even take that question seriously.

Then again, let us not nitpick over the how. That such a foundation exists, and has made headway into one of the country’s premier medical institutes, is cause enough to celebrate.