If you've been looking at self help information for any time, chances are that you'll have come across the idea of using a healing meditation to help your body to recover. Does this really help or is it all - literally - in your mind and just a glorified placebo?
First, let's look at what a healing meditation is:
The meditation itself will begin by getting you to breathe in and out, usually deeply.
In turn, this will cause your body to start to relax. This is a totally natural experience and will happen whether or not you're using a meditation to help guide you into this state of relaxation.
After that, the guided healing meditation will begin to address the problem you're experiencing. It may do this in a couple of different ways depending on whether you've got hold of a generalized healing meditation or one that is specific to your current ailment.
A general meditation will talk to your body and will usually encourage you to produce more white blood cells - your body's natural defense mechanism. At times of illness, we need more of these fighter blood cells so that we can ward off any ailments that may be afflicting us.
It's difficult to measure whether just thinking about producing more white blood cells or more antibodies will actually help our bodies to increase our production levels. There are so many variables involved that testing is difficult to say the least.
Which means that your typical doctor will deny that meditation can help your body to heal. And your typical new age meditator will swear blind that using a healing meditation was the only thing that kept them from death's door.
Chances are that, as is so often the case, the truth lies somewhere between these two opposing viewpoints.
Our bodies react to all sorts of stimuli all the time. Exercise has been proven to product more endorphins, the "feel good" neurotransmitters that our bodies produce all the time. So we know that it's perfectly possible for our bodies to produce chemicals and send them around in our blood stream. Your doctor would agree with this side of the equation.
What's more open to question is whether a healing meditation will help your body to heal. I'm on the "yes" side of the fence. Not from scientific experiment but from a time when I was confined to bed after an accident. I listened to a healing meditation on a daily basis and I know that my recovery time was a lot less than the prediction.
The thing is, there's no downside to listening to a healing meditation track. The worst that can happen is that it doesn't speed up your recovery. And even if that's the case, you'll still get to relax deeper than you would without it. The best that can happen is that it does stimulate your body's natural defense mechanism and help you to recover faster. Give it a try yourself and see how you get on!
