MEDITATION: a cure as another?

In an unstable environment and more and more anxiety, meditation in itself creates more stability for the living world. But, beyond the power it confers, meditation also has effects on health, we can measure today.

Western scientists began measuring the physiological effects of meditation there are some forty years. There were three Anglo-Saxon literature's on the subject in 1969 and 1200 in 1997. In 2007, 2,285 scientific studies analyzing the health impact of meditation. Thus, a recent study shows a better cardiac contractility in subjects engaged in meditation for many years. But it is better to speak of meditation because the term covers a multitude of practices. "To meditate is like going on a trip: there are thousands of different destinations, with as many felt strange, “said Dr. Frederick Rosenfeld, author of "Meditation is to heal.”

A different approach to relaxation:

Sometimes confused with relaxation, meditation can induce a relaxed state but it is not an end in itself. Most of the techniques are rather liberation from suffering by controlling and purifying the mind. For this, some traditions use to visualize a mental picture or reciting a mantra (transcendental meditation ...), others in control of breathing (kundalini yoga ...), and still others especially from the teaching of Gautama, the historical Buddha, recommend to bring awareness on the breath and bodily sensations, which are the objective reality of the moment (Vipassana, which means "seeing things like that they are).

Whatever the approach, these techniques of meditation can contribute to healing psychological but also physical. According to Dr. Jacques Vigne, psychiatrist, author of "Heal the soul, meditation and psychology," "Meditation is the ultimate holistic therapy in that it keeps coming back to the unit. It does not seek only the well-being, but rather a state of mental stability that equals beyond the discomfort. "For a spirit of accepting equal well-being and ill-being is a key to healing in the sense that" cure, rather than cure (which is sometimes impossible) is to establish a different relationship to disease, death, with a global vision, "writes Jon Kabat-Zinn, an American biologist trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who for thirty years, has developed its own method of meditation (MBSR) and strives to be studied the relationship between meditation and health.