Meditation - Yoga
The Connection Between Health, Stress, and Meditation
The link between meditation and healing is a venerable one indeed. Take the world's great spiritual teachers - many were renowned for their healing abilities as well as their wisdom and compassion. Jesus, for example, first revealed his spiritual maturity by helping the lame to walk and the blind to see. The Jewish mystic known as the Baal Shem Tov had a reputation as a miracle worker and healer, and the historical Buddha is traditionally likened to a physician because the practices he taught help alleviate suffering. Even the English language reflects the sacred dimension of healing: The word "heal" derives from the same root as "whole" and "holy"!
Perhaps more important for ordinary folks like you and me, these teachers passed down special meditation techniques that make it possible for practitioners to influence their bodily functions to an extraordinary degree. Ever hear about the yogis who stop their heart and live for hours without any breathing or measurable metabolism? Or the Tibetan monks who generate so much internal heat that they dry wet blankets on their bodies in subzero temperatures? These people do exist and their exceptional feats have been measured by Western researchers.
In fact, the emerging field of mind-body medicine developed in the 1970s when scientists studying the abilities of Eastern-trained meditators began to realize that the mind can have an extraordinary effect on the body, or even more precisely, that the body and the mind are inseparable. More recently, researchers studying immune response have shown that the immune system and the nervous system are inextricably intertwined and that psychological and emotional stress can suppress immune functioning and encourage the growth or spread of immune-related disorders such as cancer, AIDS, and autoimmune diseases.
These days, most physicians recognize the relevance of psychological factors and the importance of relaxation and stress reduction in maintaining health. There's even a joke making the rounds of the medical field. Instead of offering the old saw about aspirin, the contemporary mind-body physician advises: "Take two meditations and call me in the morning."
What does healing really mean?
Healing involves returning to an intrinsic state of wholeness and well-being, which our language, in its wisdom, links with the sacred. Take a cold for example. When you get better, you don't end up feeling like a different person - you just go back to being the way you were before you got sick. That's why people often say, when the cold goes away, "I finally feel like myself again!"
Meditation by its very nature provides healing of the deepest kind. The disease it helps heal is perhaps the most painful one of all - an epidemic human disorder known as separation (or, even worse, alienation) from our own being and from other beings and things. When you meditate, you heal this separation by gradually reconnecting in the here and now with your feelings, your sensate experience, and other aspects of yourself you may have previously disowned. That is, you become more whole!
