Four Ways How Meditation Helps Wellness

Though the actual goal of Meditation is to help people live a joyful, energetic, and accomplished life, healing has been an early, visible side effect. There are four ways in which meditation helps overcome illness and improves our self-healing abilities. 

PREVENTIVE: Meditation cultivates mindfulness or present-moment awareness. As more mindfulness sets in, the time spent in worry, anxiety, fear, regret, or anger reduces. Hence the body starts spending more time in the ‘rest and digest’ mode building up immunity and enabling growth instead of the ‘fight or flight’ mode that causes stress. A stress-free body builds immunity and retains the vital energy required to effectively fight off new infections and toxins.

CURATIVE: Meditation through its calming and cleansing processes declutters our mind and removes subconscious programming behind our stress that is a root cause of several psychosomatic diseases. Reduction in pain, regulation of blood pressure, efficient production of the right hormones, and resolving anxiety disorders are some of the commonly observed effects of consistent meditation practice. Epigenetic studies have shown how, in the absence of stressors, disease-causing genes get ‘down-regulated’ and constructive genes get ‘up-regulated’ - altering the chemical environment of our body for the better. 

SUPPORTIVE: Meditation helps people affected by illness by reducing and preventing anxiety and fear of the future. By enabling them to focus more on the present moment, it helps to get over the ‘why me’ and ‘what next’ phases of chronic illness. Even when the side-effects of medical treatment or the general condition of their body prevent them from getting into deep meditation, spending time just following the breath keeps their mind away from negative thoughts and emotions thereby aiding the process of recovery and healing manifold. 

POSITIVE:  Meditation improves the resilience of caretakers/family members. It helps them stay calm and positive. Meditation helps them move from being anxious to being compassionate. The positive energies from empathy, understanding, and love radiate toward the person affected by illness and aid the healing process constructively.  With clarity of mind, they can make the right choices and avoid getting overwhelmed by frustration and fear. 

Numerous research studies and thousands of documented individual experiences are evidence of the above positive influence of meditation on illness. 

All scriptures and traditions point towards the enormous power and potential innate in each one of us to create a life of peace and joy. With such divine energies inherent in each of us, why wouldn’t that include the power to heal ourselves? The only thing is we should let that innate power do its work without interrupting the ‘process’ with our biases, beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and thoughts.