Healing Meditation

My Personal Healing Meditation Experience

Last year I was project-managing a quite stressful (physically & mentally) massive renovation work at Casa-do-Sol that lasted for about a year or so. One day, I was helping out some builders who were doing some renovation work in the garden and I was distracted momentarily which caused me to fall down, injuring my arm quite badly. I managed to carry on working as if nothing had happened anyway. Next day I woke up in such a pain in my right arm elbow that was very difficult even to lift a glass of water and this pain refused to slow down for ages. I visited my GP who gave me strong pain killers (as they do!) which alleviated the pain but did not heal my arm. The pain did not go away. I stayed unable to lift anything using my right arm pain-free and got into such a distressed state since I could not use it as before any longer. Thus, I began - during my daily meditation sessions - to include this painful situation by acknowledging the pain itself. I started by focusing on the physical sensations in my right arm and treating it as if it was an annoying, crying baby, and started 'talking' to it in a kind and compassionate way telling it that I loved my arm, 'breathing in love through my heart into my elbow' and asking it kindly to leave me alone. I also visualised this 'baby' fading and disappearing away through a bright sky guided by a healing and loving sky in a bright shimmering violet cloud distancing itself and going away from me. I did it with all my good heart in it 'telling the pain' that although I 'loved it', it should now go away from my arm. I breathed air in my arm with every in-breath and released the 'cloud with the baby' with my out-breath - seeing mentally the pain cloud kindly drifting away and fading off in the sky, being, at the same time grateful for it to go away from me. I visualised myself being pain-free and having good sensations in my arm as if it had been healed, always with gratitude and compassion for myself. I felt myself being able to lift my cup of coffee without any pain and how good it felt. I kept practicing every day for as much I can recall and in a matter of days the pain started to ease off and before I knew it I was enjoying having my cup of coffee in the morning without any pain whatsoever! I started rejoicing and experienced gratefulness in such a wonderful fashion that made me smile everyday, every morning when a started making my coffee again! I felt so grateful and so wonderful for having this bad experience being turned into a positive experience through my own effort and it still makes me smile when I recall it now. I use this experience as a lesson that we can (yes we do!) learn to help ourselves through compassion, loving-kindness meditation to help ourselves with more ease when we are having bad patches in our lives, even physical painful situations when our body is fighting to heal itself... it just needs a bit of tender, love and care. I hope this story will help you to try and use mindful meditation to transform your pains into faded clouds that are no longer with you. Namaste.

​** Keep in mind that this meditation is not meant to replace any medical or psychological treatment or consultation. If you have a serious medical condition, please consult with your medical doctor immediately. Please bear in mind to not practice this meditation while driving or operating machinery .

That meditation "has been scientifically proven to activate the relaxation response, and as a result, almost every health condition improves" (Caroline Jordan) is now well known.

"Kabat-Zinn's et al. (1986) described the process of pain reduction in his paper on mindfulness and meditation. The process of pain reduction occurred by “an attitude of detached observation toward a sensation when it becomes prominent in the field of awareness and to observe with similar detachment the accompanying but independent cognitive processes which lead to evaluation and labelling of the sensation as painful, as hurt.” Thus, by “uncoupling” the physical sensation, from the emotional and cognitive experience of pain, the patient is able to reduce the pain.[5] The patients’ descriptions of distraction from pain, identifying maladaptive coping strategies toward pain and heightened awareness of pain sensation leading to behavioral changes are examples of how pain is unassociated with emotion, cognition, and sensation. Therefore recently these theories attracted several researchers who are working on pain." (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

This same research goes on to say that "Mindfulness meditation has roots in Buddhist Vipassana philosophy and practice and has been independently adopted within clinical psychology in Western societies.[6,7,8,9] Recently in Netherlands Veehof et al. conducted a systematic review of controlled and noncontrolled studies on effectiveness of acceptance-based interventions such as mindfulness-based stress reduction program, acceptance and commitment therapy for chronic pain. Primary outcomes measured were pain intensity and depression. Secondary outcomes measured were anxiety, physical well-being and quality of life.[10] Twenty-two studies randomized controlled studies clinical controlled studies without randomization and noncontrolled studies were included totaling 1235 patients with chronic pain. An effect size on pain of (0.37) was found in the controlled studies. The effect on depression was (0.32). The authors concluded that ACT and mindfulness interventions had similar effects to other cognitive-behavioral therapy interventions and that these types of interventions may be a useful alternative or adjunct to current therapies. Chiesa and Serretti also conducted another systematic review on 10 mindfulness interventions.[11] The main findings were that these interventions produced small nonspecific effects in terms of reducing chronic pain and symptoms of depression. When compared to active control groups (support and education) no additional significant effects were noted.In summary, there is a need for further studies into the specific effects of mindfulness studies on chronic pain. Regarding as the researcher knowledge efficacy of mindfulness has not been explored on quality of life of chronic pain patients in Iran. The authors aimed to examine the impact of mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) protocol designed for pain management on quality of life and pain of a homogeneous sample of females with nonspecific chronic LBP (NSCLBP) in comparison of the usual medical care group." (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).