Meditation and the Mind-Body Connection

For centuries, meditation has been the method of choice for inducing relaxation and achieving peace of mind. In fact, eastern medicine has known all along what the West is now beginning to understand: that the mind and body cannot be separated, and that meditation is a powerful tool in helping the mind trigger the hormonal responses needed to achieve a healthier body. Since our mind is the connective force between the various systems of the body, meditation is a way to bring all those systems into harmony and equilibrium.

The term meditation refers to a mind-body practice that increases calmness and physical relaxation, improves psychological balance, and enhances overall wellness. Though various cultures and religious groups have practiced it in one form or another, meditation in itself is neither a religion nor a philosophy. Rather, it’s a tool that uses the conditioning power of the brain to evoke relaxation, tranquility, and inner peace. The end result is both a decrease in negative stress reactions and a triggering of what’s been called the “relaxation response.” It’s through a decrease in the body’s stress reactions that we boost our immune system and keep our body healthy and disease free.

In western cultures, meditation often incorporates vocal such as Gregorian chants, repetitive words, as used by Catholics in reciting the Hail Mary on rosary beads, incantations from the Hebrew Kabbalah, and spiritual chants used by Native Americans. All of these techniques are aimed at achieving a deep state of awareness and, at the same time, using the power of the mind to succumb to relaxation.

We’ve made a complete circle in the way we think about the effects of meditation on health. In the past, the concept of a mind-body connection was accepted as a foregone conclusion. People meditated because they knew that healing the body required healing the soul as well. During the last century, though, scientists and physicians, as well as companies marketing an explosion of newly developed drugs and medicines, had us convinced that the body is simply a machine that needs repair when it breaks or wears down. The power of the mind to trigger self-healing was largely discounted until newly educated scientists actually began testing practitioners of meditation and found that mind over matter is not just an expression but a medical fact of life.

How and Why Meditation Works

There are several different forms of meditation, most of which originated in ancient religious and spiritual traditions. The two most common types are mindfulness medita-ion, which is an essential component of Zen Buddhism, and transcendental meditation (TM), derived from Hindu traditions. In both types, the person achieves a state of deeply relaxed awareness. The main difference is that in mindfulness meditation, the individual’s attention is on breathing and focusing on what is being experienced while in transcendental meditation, the focus is on a mantra that prevents distracting thoughts from entering the mind.

Meditation connects the mind and body by inducing physical changes that affect the involuntary or autonomic nervous system (ANS). This system regulates many organs and muscles, and it affects functions such as heartbeat, breathing, digestion, and sweating. The sympathetic division of the ANS triggers the “fight-or-flight response,” which increases heart rate, breathing, and blood flow whenever we’re stressed. The parasympathetic division does the opposite: it decreases heart rate and breathing, and causes us to slow down. Practicing meditation reduces activity in the sympathetic division and increases activity in the parasympathetic division.

One of the main reasons that meditation has been around for at least 5,000 years is that, at its core, it’s very simple. There’s no need for tools or sophisticated gadgets. And an individual can meditate alone and just about anywhere he or she chooses. In essence, meditation works because it relies on the untapped power of the brain to guide the body processes responsible for mental, emotional, and physical cleansing.

The benefits of meditation start almost immediately. Stress and anxiety are reduced, heart rate is decreased, blood pressure is lowered, immunity is enhanced, and energy levels are boosted. When blood is drawn from individuals who are meditating, it typically has a significantly lower ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate), a test that indicates the likelihood of disease, illness, or infection. The rules for proper meditation enhance these effects and make the experience much more effective and enjoyable. Adhering to these rules from the outset ensures that meditation works the way it’s supposed to.

How Meditation Affects the Mind-Body Connection

The beauty of meditation lies in its simplicity. Allow the mind to free itself of negative thoughts and conditioning and the body will respond by automatically relaxing, healing, and rejuvenating itself in the process. It goes beyond that, though. The act of meditation has a profound effect on the mind-body connection, changing brainwave patterns, specifically enhancing alpha brain waves, which promote health and self-healing. Furthermore, meditation lowers blood levels of cortisol, the main hormone involved in negative stress reactions and susceptibility to disease.

One of the first to use meditation as a means of balancing the body’s physiological processes was Dr. Herbert Bensen, Director of the Mind-Body Institute at Harvard Medical School, who found that meditation countered the effects of the sympathetic nervous system involved in the fight-or flight response. He observed decreased muscle tension, blood pressure, body temperature, and basal metabolic rate. In general, the patients who meditated had healthier immune systems and recovered more quickly when they did get sick.

Since Dr. Bensen’s pioneering efforts, others have shown similar results. Researchers at the Biofeedback and Psycho-physiology Clinic at the Menninger Foundation have demonstrated that cancer and AIDS patients had stronger immune systems when they used meditative techniques either alone or in conjunction with biofeedback. Dr. Dean Ornish, the famous heart surgeon, found that heart disease could be reversed with a comprehensive program that includes meditation. Because of these remarkable findings, over six thousand physicians now practice meditation and recommend it to their patients.

Based on two decades of clinic studies, we know that meditation affects virtually every part of the body. The mind-body network is mobilized into action and conditioned to bring the two into balance. Besides stress relief, meditation reduces pain, slows tumor growth, reverses heart disease, lowers blood pressure, treats insomnia, lowers cholesterol, increases fertility, moderates asthma, reduces PMS and migraines, and treats fibromyalgia. The psychological benefits include decreased anxiety and depression, and enhanced mood, concentration, and learning.

In a new study, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, the University of Arizona, Boston University, and Emory University found that the effects of meditation last well beyond the time that you’re actually practicing it. What researchers saw was that activity in the brain’s amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for emotional reactions, decreased in response to stress and negative life events after taking an eight-week course in meditation. This was the first time that meditation was shown to affect emotional re-sponse even when a person is not in a meditative state. The results of the study are profound in that we now know for certain that meditation is not just an immediate reaction that lasts for the duration of the exercise but is a long-term response that enables one to cope with stress and negative emotions throughout the day.

The body doesn’t really care how the mind does it, as long as the results are effective and long-lasting. Whether meditation is through prayer, mindfulness meditation, transcendental meditation, Zen meditation, Buddhist meditation, or Taoist meditation doesn’t matter. All these practices have three things in common: (1) quieting of the busy mind; (2) focusing concentration on a sound, word, image, or breath; and (3) directing the body to fall into a deeply relaxed state. According to Dr. Borysenko, author of Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, “meditation can put one in touch with the inner physician, allowing the body’s own inner wisdom to be heard.”

From: Stress, Disease & the Mind-Body Connection: Using the Power of the Brain for Health and Self-Healing by Dr. Andrew Goliszek