Meditation is a tool for making your mind clear. Meanwhile, some people think that it can be more than that. Since the state of our mind has something to do with the health of our body, it is natural that guess that meditation may help in fixing some health issues. Before we go into that, let me first illustrate how you can tell that your mind can affect your body. When you are feeling a lot of stress at work, I bet your shoulders feel really tight. For some people, they may feel some pain in their stomach. Before we move on to talk about what meditation therapy is and what it is for, let me make it clear that meditation is not something magical, but rather a simple tool to calm and clear your mind.
What is Meditation Therapy?
Meditation therapy is simple the process of using meditation as part of a therapy. It is a therapy that tries to heal mental issues. Some common issues are depression and drug problems. Meditation most of the time would not be the only item in the therapy and it is basically used as the element that helps you clear and relax your mind. Meditation therapy is sometimes referred to as reflective meditation therapy. Our body’s health has a lot to do with our level of stress and a lot of our mental and body issues are direct or indirect results of high stress. It makes a lot of sense to reduce the root cause which is stress in many cases.
Why Meditation Can Help You Reduce Stress
Stress is a very strange thing. It is sometimes formed by seeing problems bigger than they really are. For example, some people can get some high stress because of a challenging request by their bosses. If you can really see things as they are, you can see that the only thing you can do is to try your best at completing your requested mission. If it doesn’t work out, it just doesn’t. What else can you do if you have already tried your best. I would like to borrow the big idea from stocism to illustrate the point. We have to know what we can control and what we cannot control. We shouldn’t concerned about what we cannot control, in this case, your boss’s reaction and your future in the company. Now, back to today’s topic. Meditation is a great tool to clear our mind. With a clear mind, we can see things as they are. We have a better chance to not see a problem bigger than it is. Even if it is a big problem, a clear mind can help design the best approach to solve the problem. If the probably eventually don’t play out for you, just let it me. If you treat most things logically with minimal emotion (I don’t suggest you to give no emotion to your family and friends), you can live in a more stress-free world.
Meditation Therapy the Informal Way
Some people use the term “meditation therapy” more casually. What they mean is to simply use meditation as some kind of therapy. As mentioned, making your mind clear can help you reduce your stress level and therefore meditating regularly can help you improve your overall mental health and body health. I would say that it helps quite a lot in terms of mental health but don’t expect that much for your body health. What meditation really do for you body health is that it may reduce your symptoms that are caused by stress such as your shoulder pain and neck pain.
What Types of Issue Do Meditation Fix?
There are good amounts of studies show that meditation can reduce stress, headache, acnes, sleep disorders, neck pain, shoulder pain and back pain. Some people go as far as saying that it may help with dealing with high blood pressure, immune system and even cancer. I would take that with a grain of salt unless there are some really detailed and convincing studies in the future to prove that.
Meditation as a Healing Tool is Somewhat Controversial
Meditation can only be considered as a tool for heeling some stress-induced health issues because it allows us to clear our mind, see things and problems clearly and rationally and have our level of stress lowered. But some people has high level of doubt about meditation. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that too many people associate meditation with some woo-woo, new-age stuff like the law of attractive and things of that sort. I want to clarify here that meditation has nothing to do with the law of attractive. I don’t want to actually talk about about this point because I don’t exactly know or care what the law of attractive really mean.
Brain Scans Tell Us Meditation Can Change Our Brain
If you want some science-backed evidence on whether meditation can really change our brain, the good news is that today’s brain scanning technology has allowed scientists to do exactly that. It is found that monks who meditate a lot as more brain waves that are responsible for problem solving than people who don’t meditate. In order words, the monks have better ability to think logically and that’s a huge key in reducing stress.
Stocism & Meditation
As an interesting side note, I want to write a little about stocism and meditation, two of my most interested subjects. Stocism is an ancient Greek philosophy that emphasizes on learning how to differentiate what you can control from what you can’t, and learn how to not concern about what we can’t control. Meditation is a great tool that works perfectly with stocism. It is only that when you have a clear mind that you can differentiate what you can control from what you can’t. It is just very interesting to me that these two ancient tools, meditation that is believed to come from China and India, and stocism that comes from Greek, can become tools that work together so perfectly thousands of years after they were first discovered.