Healing Meditation: Part Of An Overall Health Solution
Practicing a healing meditation every day will not cure you of any illness. However, healing meditation can help you not only manage your stress, but help your body's natural healing functions. Meditation can be used to support usual medical therapies. People who feel they have hope and lower stress levels tend to heal better than those who feel utterly helpless. Healing meditation can also help improve the quality of your life during your illness.
What Is It?
Healing meditation is just like any other kind of meditation, only it involves you visualizing your body healing itself. You can sit, lie down, have your MRI scan, ride in the car as a passenger and initiate a healing meditation. You do not have to be in any particular bodily position, worship any particular Deity or have any incense lit.
This article is going to assume that you already know the basics of meditation. This is when you focus on one thing at a time. You live in the present moment and only in the present moment. You only need to practice a few minutes a day to start with. It's very hard at first, and that's okay. If you want to know more, there are many fine websites, books and DVDs on meditation for beginners, including the other articles on this site.
When you are in a meditative state, imagine very strongly in your head that your body's white cells are battling mucus-green blobs. You don't have to use that exact imagery - but that's what I do. You might see your body's immune system as a white light, or as little knights in shining armor ready to go forth in battle against invading bacteria. Have fun with it. It's your time to be good to you.
Does It Work?
Healing meditation's results vary among every individual. It seems to help some people better than others. When I say "work", I mean helping to not only lessen pain, but help make the patient more relaxed and hopeful. There really isn't any strong scientific evidence that healing meditation makes a significant contribution to an actual cure. But it certainly can help make life more bearable, which is all some of us really need.
Healing meditation - or any kind of meditation, for that matter - has been proven to help the body not produce as much blood lactate, which is something the body makes when it is under stress. It also helps the body not make as much of the hormone cortisol, which helps put the body into a "flight or fight" response.
