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Meditation: How Can it Help Me?

Throughout my years of practice, I have often viewed meditation as a path to mindfulness and awareness, and through this a subsequent entrée into mentalization leading to healthy attachments.

In this past year, I have engaged in both Qi Gong meditation exercises, Tai Chi (sometimes referred to as a moving meditation), and most recently, a type of meditation termed Modern-Day Meditation. All of these techniques have proven useful in helping me center and ground myself. And there are yet other types of meditation that have helped countless others including Transcendental Meditation, Mindfulness Meditation, Zen Meditation, Buddhist Meditation, and Taoist Meditation. Furthermore, there are a variety of methods of meditating ranging from sitting in a fairly fixed position to more expressive meditation wherein the body can move in any manner and let anything happen, and finally to the practice of mindful meditation wherein someone can go about their daily activities in a mindfully mediated state. Currently, I engage most often in a method of guided meditation termed Modern-Day Meditation that I have found enormously helpful in assisting both myself and my patients in getting in touch with feelings along with letting go of those feelings that can be disruptive to one's life.

I understand all meditation as a process by which someone goes within themselves blending one's internal world into a depth of external consciousness. The meditation that I employ in my practice is a guided meditation technique using specific songs that help to elicit a variety of feelings unique and appropriate for each particular patient. These could be songs that have angry themes, sad themes, or painful themes; whatever songs elicit feelings that help guide my patient deeper and deeper into an emotive state that lays underneath ones thinking. This is a process which often times requires many practice sessions in order to go deeply enough to get in touch with very profound and meaningful emotive experiences. But getting in touch with these feelings is only the first step in allowing the meditative practice to help. Once one is in touch with deep feelings there needs to be a period of time wherein those feelings are released and then replaced with calming, beautiful feelings of light, love, care, and compassion, and in so doing, there is a gradual therapeutic effect of letting go of painful feelings and replacing them with feelings that are comforting.

For many people, this type of guided meditation is a practice that is difficult to comfortably engage. It is very important for people to keep their eyes closed throughout this type of meditative practice in order to try to stay within oneself, shutting out visual cues that might take one out of his or her depth, and promoting the patient to focus inward. Riveting music can serve to help the patient go deeper and deeper into those feelings that are evoked by that music, and in so doing, promote awareness of emotional states that lay underneath one's thinking.

Meditative practices such as the one I have described cannot simply be cathartic. Psychological research has shown that catharsis in and of itself typically produces no long term benefit. However, getting in touch with deep feelings and then actively calming oneself in the service of letting in whatever is beautiful to the individual, i.e., whatever is filled with light and love for that individual, can be powerfully therapeutic in ridding oneself of either acute or longstanding pain and sadness.

Sometimes, my patients have lives filled with pain secondary to their sensitivity and "thin skinned" nature. This has left them feeling the pain of others, both in their immediate environment as well as in the world in which we all live. Such individuals in my practice have often benefited from meditation as it has enhanced their awareness of their pain, fostered mindfulness, and provided a means to replace some of that pain with feelings of light and love. Furthermore, as an attachment-based psychotherapist, I have worked with this as a means to promote pathways to healthier attachment, the sine qua non of healthy relationships.

In closing, I want to emphasize the power of meditation. Meditation has been found to cause significant changes in metabolic rate and blood pressure. Rate of respiration and blood pressure can also decrease as a result of meditation. My patients have talked about an overall improvement in their sense of psychological well being when they experience an increased capacity to "let go" of upsetting feelings that have tormented them, sometimes for many years. In recent years, many physicians have supported the use of meditation as a meaningful component of any integrated healthcare program. Recognizing the value of meditation both physiologically, psychologically, and spiritually has been enormously helpful to my patients and I am confident that it will remain an important part of my practice.

May, 2008