BellaOnline Forums Religion and Spirituality Buddhism Amazing Science on the Benefits of Meditation

Hi all, my latest article is a review of The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific D...r of Meditation. It provides a lot of fascinating research on the benefits of meditation and mindfulness practice. Here's some excerpts:

- Patients suffering from chronic pain showed a marked decrease in their reported pain, comparable or even better than pain medication in many cases, with just 8 weeks of mindfulness (MBSR) training, and the improvement lasted for up to a year.

- When patients undergoing UV Light treatment for Psoriasis were taught a complementary healing meditation to do as they received treatment, they healed at a rate 4 times faster than those who did not incorporate the meditation into treatment.

- When given a flu vaccine, the bodies of regular meditators produced a significantly higher level of antibodies in response than non-meditators, indicating their immune response is stronger overall.

- Long-term meditators experience permanent brain changes including a heightened ability to recognize their quality of mind, which contributes to their ability to focus and achieve clarity in any task, and a heightened ability to generate compassion and 'other-related' focus, as opposed to only 'self-related' focus.

- Although often associated with relaxation, meditation is in fact a very active state, generating brain waves associated with creativity and focus, while de-emphasizing those associated with mental activity.

- Patients suffering from clinical depression who underwent mindfulness based cognitive training (MBCT) had a markedly lower recurrence rate than those who only received standard treatment.

If that doesn't motivate your meditation practice nothing will, right?

Any other benefits anyone would like to share?

Harmonising the mind and body through mediation enables all of the things mentioned above and more. The main thing is not to meditate with a specific goal in mind, but just to meditate. The focus and self-awareness you develop though meditation can be focused in healing and magickal ways outside meditation, but must not be mistaken for the practice of meditation itself

Hi Ian, I know where you are coming from, but I actually have come to think a bit differently. I think 'meditation' has come to mean many different things, and that's OK, it's just a word. The forms taught in scientific medical research are almost always secular based and specifically designed for healing benefits, and many of the people that enter into those programs would not meditate at all initially except for that purpose - specifically with the goal of pain management or lowering blood pressure etc. But then for many people, it evolves into an inquiry and/or a spiritual practice. So I think it's OK for people to have a goal in mind if it motivates them, especially initially.

In my own teaching, I offer many different kinds of meditation classes, and many are oriented around healing and/or intuitive development, because that's what people are often interested in. For some, it evolves into more than that, and the initial goals become secondary. For some it becomes a lifelong practice. For others, it stays goal-oriented, and I think that's fine. Whether all of these practices should be called 'meditation' is another discussion - a lot of practices fall under that term these days, but in English we don't have many other words to work with.

Thanks for commenting:-)

The Bible lends credence to the importance of meditation. Meditation helps strenghten the mind, body and soul. A life full of rich meditation is a life full of rigour and good things happening around him/her.

This was a serious topic of conversation when I was doing my hypnotherapy and counselling course. A significant portion of the class were, or had been, meditators for varying lengths of time as well as a combination of different spiritual paths and Atheists.

The general consensus was that mediation integrated the person while providing peripheral benefits on the healing and 'abilities' front. Focussed 'inner journeys' such as pathworking, healing, and remote viewing, "Felt" different from meditation. The group also thought that the focus on abilities could cause the person to avoid facing some aspects of their personality that could cause them problems if it wasn't already.

This is why the 'Traditional Craft' (as opposed to Wicca) have gone so deep underground in the present day. Too many people want the perceived power of magick without having to do the self development that goes with it.

Hi Ian, that's very interesting. Yes, I can see how with magick that could be a big problem. It is a similar idea with 'siddha' powers in the Eastern traditions - they are not supposed to be sought for the own sake, but sometimes evolve as a byproduct. Of course there are all sorts of cautionary tales in Eastern teaching lineages of individuals who sought the siddhas without the spiritual intent, i.e. without the self-development/awareness aspect, and what happened as a result (falling into dark states of some sort etc.)

And there are similar concerns in modern spiritual communities based on these lineages that too much information is now available that can be abused - that the teachings should remain esoteric and only passed directly from teacher to student. It is evolving differently in different lineages, with some translating all their teachings openly and offering them, and others keeping many teachings more secretive.

I think in my initial response I was thinking more of the techniques used in these scientific studies, Mindfulness-Based-Stress-Reduction and Mindfulness-Based-Cognitive-Therapy, which have become standards in the psychological community and are taught in a completely secular context for pain management, stress reduction etc. They are mostly deep breathing and body-based techniques, and people come to them for health reasons, usually with no spiritual intent whatsoever, and I see that as a positive thing. I have known several people who then came to explore meditation on a deeper level, and it did evolve into a self-development/spiritual journey. So in those cases, approaching meditation initially with the 'goal' of better health had an overall positive impact.

It is of course very important to most psychologists that the techniques are kept secular and health-based, because otherwise people may object to them on religious grounds, i.e. that a Christian should not be taught a 'Buddhist' technique.

The techniques in the studies you are talking about are strongly connected to self hypnosis as much as mediation. Do you consider meditation to be a form of hypnosis?

Hi Ian, I think of meditation and hypnosis as very different, although I am not trained in hypnosis at all. I know from a neuro-scientific perspective, from what I have read, they are considered very different, in terms of what parts of the brain get activated and which quiet down during each activity. In terms of healing, they can be used for the same goals, but the process itself is different. The big difference seems to be that in meditation the goal is really awareness of conditioning, while in hypnosis you are usually trying to recondition some habit or response.

Of course there are lots of different meditation techniques, and I'm sure lots of different hypnosis techniques as well, so sometimes it is hard to tell what people are referring to until you get into the details. These particular studies were rooted in fairly classic Vipassana-based breathing mindfulness meditation, which initially are concentration based, but over time, are really meant to take you into a very aware, place awareness itself. Many of the classic texts on this actually warn against self-hypnosis (as they understand it anyway) because that's considered an unconscious or unaware type state.

The way I see it normal consciousness is like using a torch (flashlight) in a dark room, you only perceive what the beam is illuminating and a little bit around the main beam. Hypnosis is like turning the light on, and you are only limited by your vision as to what you see. Meditation is the light on, and the rooms walls become transparent and reflective - you can see the rest of the house and the outside in all directions.

A lot of my hypnotherapy work is to do with sports hypnosis, usually enhancing perceptions and reactions along with time distortion. So it can be a tool to expand consciousness, but few people have seen it used in that way.