The Psychology of Meditation and Health Recovery
by Shanti Shanti
Kaur Khalsa, Ph.D.
Ruby was an energetic career track executive with a television production
company when she was diagnosed with colon cancer at age thirty-four. "Who
gets colon cancer at my age? I was devastated.
No one I knew had faced anything
like this and many of my friends and family members were more afraid of
my being ill than I was. In my field you're not supposed to get sick.
Looking good is as important
as working hard. I was terrified of losing my job or not getting promoted
if anyone at work found out.
There were few people I could confide in. I felt so alone and helpless.
I attended a meditation class for people with cancer out of sheer desperation."
Receiving a diagnosis of a chronic
or life-threatening illness is one of life's biggest shocks. Such news
stops us right in our tracks and jolts us from the automatic pilot we most
often operate from.
Time itself takes on a whole
new meaning.
Even with the best medical care,
people with illness find they struggle with depression, despair, fear,
anxiety, anger, confusion about treatment decisions, and uncertainty about
the future.
In addition, clients and
their family members tell me that often it seems that the treatment is
as destablizing
to them as the illness itself.
Practice of Meditation
Meditation practice has long been known
to address the emotional aspects of being human, to improve physical health
and well being in people with cancer, heart disease and pain patients,
to tap our inner strengths, and help us find meaning in our lives.
It makes
sense that people with illness
find it helpful during medical treatment and recovery.
Ruby continues, "Meditation practice
gave me more than the relief from anxiety that I had sought. It awakened
in me the understanding that there is something more to be healthy for
than just my career.
The cancer diagnosis gave me a kick in
the behind, yet it was the meditation practice that woke me up to the
true
value of
my life. I could have just gone through the treatment protocol and removed
the cancer.
If I had done only that, then I would still be anxious and
depressed and driven to keep measuring my self worth by my career advancements.
Instead, practicing meditation unlocked my real gifts, gave me the vitality
to create a new future, and helped me garner the inner support to sustain
it. It
opened in me a deep desire to change how I had been living my life."
As
early as 1964, UCLA researcher Dr. George Solomon found evidence that emotions
play an important role in physical disease associated with the immune system.
The term psychoneuroimmunology, coined by Dr. Solomon, refers to the psychological
influences of experience, stress, emotions, beliefs, traits, and coping on
immune function and on the onset and course of a wide variety of diseases.
The
relationship between health, psychology, and meditation practice has
been of increasing interest among medical researchers over the
past forty
years
and as a result there is in progress a shift in the perspective on the role
of meditation
practice and health recovery.
Evidence suggests that the health and well
being of individuals affected by HIV are not solely dependent on the
achievements of the biomedical approach.
In the
early years of the AIDS epidemic, Doctors George Solomon and Lydia Temoshok
found that long term survivors of AIDS had certain psychological traits
in common,
including what health psychologists call "self-efficacy", the
belief that what you do makes a difference. Later, Dr. Robert Ramien from
Columbia
University in New York found that long term non-progressors--people living
with HIV infection
but not showing symptoms--had strong self efficacy profiles. Other researchers
have shown that self-efficacy plays a pivotal role in the enhancement of
the immune system, in health behavior, and in quality of life in cancer
patients.
The good news? The practice of meditation improves self-efficacy.
Clinically I have seen evidence of this in hundreds of clients with a
variety of medical
conditions, and have conducted a study demonstrating meditation practice
improves self-efficacy in people living with HIV.
Film maker Carolyn Speranza
had been struggling with stress related health problems for years before
she started to practice meditation. She found
that as her anxiety
lessened, her self-efficacy strengthened, and her health improved. Encouraged
by her own experiences, she made a film about the effects of meditation
called Sight of Stillness which asks the question of meditators, "What
do you see when you close your eyes?" For the premier screening
of the film she hosted a meditation symposium at the Carnege Science
Center in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania
and invited me to share with participants what people with illness see
when they meditate. I asked a dozen or more clients how meditation has
helped
them in recovering
from illness and they replied that it gave them....
Hope for a return
to health.
A sense of what is possible, from this, I can explore what
is available to me.
Connection, support. I know and feel that I am not
alone in this.
Peacefulness, freedom from worry or uncertainty about
the future.
Joy to be alive right now.
Calm, to just be in the present moment.
Clarity to make decisions.
Confidence to carry them out.
Energy to enjoy life.
Self-efficacy to take action. I believe in myself
now.
Self-trust to be comfortable in the face of uncertainty.
Inner guidance
to know what is my path.
Sacredness to meet life and death with joy
and peace.
What do I see when I close my eyes to meditate? My future.
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