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Science has revealed associations between meditation and lowered blood pressure, pulse rate, and stress chemicals in the bloodstream. For people under stress, who typically are running a lot of adrenaline through their systems, meditation gives the body a chance to recuperate and flush the adrenaline out of the tissues-in other words it restores them to pre-stress levels. This can take days, by the way. Young people recover from stress quicker than elders.
Meditation is also good for heart patients, especially those with angina; they experience fewer episodes. Some studies on breast cancer patients indicate that meditation boosts immunity against carcinoma. Meditation definitely leads to better emotional expression and processing, and that decreases stress and stress-related complications, which some physicians believe are at least partly responsible for up to 80 percent of the conditions patients come to their offices to get treatment for. It promotes healing following surgery. And individuals with chronic pain are able to tolerate it better. So it improves quality of life.
Dr. Steven Hodes, author of Meta-Physician on Call for Better Health (2007), is our guest teacher today. A board certified gastroenterologist, with over 25 years in private practice, he received his medical degree from The Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He also has a degree in Religious Studies from Franklin and Marshall College.
Experimenting with Meditation
An Essay by Steven E. Hodes, M.D.
Why not experiment with meditation? Give yourself permission to wonder about the enormity of existence, and to create thoughts and feelings that allow you to access your inner peace. Think of the process as if you were given an opportunity to write a religious text or prayer. Understand that some other human being, living centuries before, seized the opportunity to put his meditation on paper. It became the prayer that may have inspired you in the present. Your meditation is your own personal prayer. Meditation should be that open and flexible.
Whether your meditation is the repetition of words or phrases, or it is the practice of witnessing your thoughts and feelings, you must find a way to meditate that resonates with your inner being. As being in an aware state of consciousness is a subjective experience, the style and form you choose are up to you. Meditation is nothing more than you being with yourself. How that is accomplished is as varied as each individual. There is no right or wrong way to meditate. The goal of meditation is to control the incessant mind-talk that bombards your consciousness.
Meditation is not the same as a peak experience, an alternative experience, or an involuntary spiritual/mystical encounter with the unknown. Rather, it is the product of your intention and requires a purposeful setting aside of time and place. When you meditate you are creating a window in time when the chaos of thought and feeling is observed to be separate from your own being.
It is said that a full vessel cannot accept anything more. By emptying yourself of conscious thought and feeling, inspiration can enter.
Meditation is a time when the body responds to the mind, when aware-relaxation is experienced. It is a time when stress hormones (adrenaline, cortisol, and the hypothalamic peptides) are subdued. Blood pressure and pulse rate drop, and muscle tension diminishes. The mind finds itself in an internal state of peace and happiness, and these correlate with PET scan findings of the brain. It is a time when healing occurs, when our immune system regains its composure, when invading pathogens and newly minted malignant cells can be identified and destroyed.
So meditate when you can find the time and when you can't. Ironically the times when you can't are the times when you probably should.
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