Meditation - Top 7 Conditions To Get Healed With Mind Power

By Raymond Geok Seng Lee

During the two decades since the relaxation response first appeared, mediation has gone mainstream. Most people who practice it do so to reduce stress, anxiety, anger and other negative emotions. But increasingly, physicians prescribe meditation as part of the treatment for a large and growing number of medical conditions. Here are some of the conditions that mediation can help.

1. Panic Attacks

Sometimes anxiety becomes paralyzing and people feel that they are about to suffer some horrible fate. Panic attacks are often treated with drugs, but studies show that if people who are prone to panic attacks begin focused, meditative breathing the instant they feel the first signs of an episode, they are less likely to have a full-blown panic attack.

2. Pain Management

Anxiety decreases the threshold for pain, and pain causes anxiety. The result is a vicious cycle. Compared with people who feel relaxed, those under stress experience pain more intensely and become even more stressed, which aggravates their pain. Meditation breaks this cycle. Childbirth preparation classes routinely teach pregnant women deep breathing exercises to minimize the pain and anxiety of labor. Few call it breath meditation, but that is what it is. Meditation may not eliminate pain, but it helps people cope more effectively. In a recent study at the Mind/Body Medical Institute, after people with chronic pain learned the relaxation response, their pain-related physician visits decreased 36 percent.

3. High Blood Pressure

Transcendental meditation (TM) reliably reduced blood pressure in meditators. In a study, the relaxation response was taught to 36 people with moderately elevated blood pressure. After several weeks of practice, their average blood pressure declined significantly, reducing their risk of stroke and heart attack.

4. Cancer

Cancer is very scary. Meditation and other approaches to deep relaxation help center people so they can figure out how they would like to handle the illness and proceed with life.

5. Respiratory Crises

Asthma, emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) all restrict breathing and raise fears of suffocation, which in turn makes breathing even more difficult. Studies show that when people with these respiratory conditions learn breath meditation, they have fewer respiratory crises.

6. Depression

Feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and isolation are hallmarks of depression - the nation's most prevalent mental health problem. Meditation increases self-confidence and feelings of connection to others. Studies have shown mood elevation in depressed people who regularly elicit the relaxation response.

7. Infertility

Couples dealing with infertility may become depressed, anxious and angry. To help them cope, relaxation response was taught to one group of infertile couples at the Mind/Body Institute. Compared with a similar group of infertile couples who did not learn deep relaxation, the meditators experienced less distress - and were more likely to get pregnant.

Raymond Lee Geok Seng is one of the foremost experts in the health and fitness industry and is a writer specializing in body health, muscle development and dieting. He has spent countless of time and efforts conducting research and share his insightful and powerful secrets to benefit men and women all over the world. He is currently the author of the latest edition of "Neck Exercises and Workouts." Visit http://www.bodyfixes.com for more information.

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About Meditation to Improve Mental and Physical Health

By: Knut Holt

Meditation is a group of mental training techniques. You can use meditation to improve mental health and capacities, to improve your motivation for your goals and also to help improve the physical health. Some of these techniques are very simple, so you can learn them from a book or an article; others require guidance by a qualified meditation teacher.

WHAT IS MEDITATION

Most techniques called meditation include these components:

1. You sit or lie in a relaxed position with closed eyes.
2. You breathe regularly. You breathe in deep enough to get enough oxygen. When you breathe out, you relax your muscles so that your lungs are well emptied, but without straining.
3. You stop thinking about everyday problems and matters.
4. You concentrate your thoughts upon some sound, some word you repeat, some image, some abstract concept or some feeling. Your whole attention should be pointed at the object you have chosen to concentrate upon.
5. If some foreign thoughts creep in, you just stop this foreign thought, and go back to the object of meditation.

The different meditation techniques differ according to the degree of concentration, and how foreign thoughts are handled. By some techniques, the objective is to concentrate so intensely that no foreign thoughts occur at all.

In other techniques, the concentration is more relaxed so that foreign thoughts easily pop up. When these foreign thoughts are discovered, one stops these and goes back to the pure meditation in a relaxed manner. Thoughts coming up, will often be about things you have forgotten or suppressed, and allow you to rediscover hidden memory material. This rediscovery will have a psychotherapeutic effect.

THE EFFECTS OF MEDITATION

Meditation has the following effects:

1. Meditation will give you rest and recreation.
2. You learn to relax.
3. You learn to concentrate better on problem solving.
4. Meditation often has a good effect upon the blood pressure.
5. Meditation has beneficial effects upon inner body processes, like circulation, respiration and digestion.
6. Regular meditation will have a psychotherapeutically effect.
7. Regular meditation will facilitate the immune system.
8. Meditation is usually pleasant.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HYPNOSIS AND MEDITATION

Hypnosis may have some of the same relaxing and psychotherapeutic effects as meditation. However, when you meditate you are in control yourself; by hypnosis you let some other person or some mechanical device control you. Also hypnosis will not have a training effect upon the ability to concentrate.

A SIMPLE FORM OF MEDITATION

Here is a simple form of meditation. By this meditation technique, you should concentrate in an easy manner. This will allow foreign thoughts to pop up. These are handled one by one as they appear. You proceed as follows:

1. Sit in a good chair in a comfortable position.
2. Close your eyes and relax all your muscles as well as you can.
3. Stop thinking about anything, or at least try not to think about anything.
4. Breath out, relaxing all the muscles in your breathing apparatus.
5. Repeat the following in 10 - 20 minutes:

-- Breath in so deep that you feel you get enough oxygen.-- Breath out, relaxing your chest and diaphragm completely.-- Every time you breathe out, think the word "one" or another simple word inside yourself. You should think the word in a prolonged manner, and so that you hear it inside you, but you should try to avoid using your mouth or voice.

6. If foreign thoughts come in, just stop these thoughts in a relaxed manner, and keep on concentrating upon the breathing and the word you repeat.

As you proceed through this meditation, you should feel steadily more relaxed in your mind and body, feel that you breathe steadily more effectively, and that the blood circulation throughout your body gets more efficient. You may also feel an increasing mental pleasure throughout the meditation.

THE EFFECTS OF MEDITATION UPON DISEASES

As any kind of training, meditation may be exaggerated so that you get tired and worn out. Therefore you should not meditate so long or so concentrated that you feel tired or mentally emptied.

Meditation may sometimes give problems for people suffering from mental diseases, epilepsy, serious heart problems or neurological diseases. On the other hand, meditation may be of help in the treatment of these and other conditions.

People suffering from such conditions should check out what effects the different kinds of meditation have on their own kind of health problems, before beginning to practise meditation, and be cautious if they choose to begin to meditate. It may be wise to learn meditation from an experienced teacher, psychologist or health worker that use meditation as a treatment module for the actual disease.

Article Source: http://physicalfitnessarticles.net

Knut Holt is an IT consultant and marketer focusing on health items. -----TO FIND natural help against aging symptoms, acne, skin problems, hypothyroidism, hemorrhoids, heart problems, joint pain, over-weight and much more, PLEASE VISIT:---- www.abicana.com ----Free to reprint with the author's name and link.