Meditation Treatment

By Dr. Dany Lousky

Meditation is a method of treatment characteristic of the spiritual dimension. Through meditation, it is possible to train and practice the ability to define the desire (desire to receive or desire to give) and its direction (to receive so as to give or to give so as to receive).
Goleman (2006) in his article Destructive Emotions details the findings of research studies on the topic of meditation in recent years. The conclusion deriving from the recent scientific findings is that people who meditate have an advantage. The researches prove that meditation strengthens the immune system and brain scans show that it promotes the alleviation of tensions.
Physicians recommend meditation as a way of preventing, slowing, or at least controlling pains induced by chronic illnesses, such as heart problems, AIDS, cancer, and sterility. It can also be used to increase the balance in situations of psychiatric disorders such as depression, hyperactivity, and attention deficit disorders, in combination between Eastern mysticism and Western science. For thirty years, the meditation researchers told us that it works wonderfully as a medicine for situations of pressure, according to Goleman (2006), but what is exciting in the new researches is seeing how meditation can train the mind and reshape it. Researches conducted using most sophisticated apparatus of simulation show that it can change the wiring in the brain, and shift, for example, the breaking point, where a traffic jam, for example, causes people to go crazy with nerves. Goleman relates that Richard Davidson from Wisconsin University used brain scans to show that meditation diverts the activity in the forward part of the brain (directly behind the forehead), from the right lobe to the left lobe. Following the research Davidson argues that the regular practice of meditation changes the tendencies in the brain from a state of ‘fight or flee’ to a state of acceptance and comfort. This change, he says, brings with it a rise in the level of satisfaction.
Goleman further says that John Cabot, who studied Buddhism in the 1960s and founded the Clinic for the Alleviation of Tension in the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine in 1979 attempted to find scientific ways to prove the healing powers of meditation. Over the years he succeeded in helping more than fourteen thousand people cope with pain without the use of medications, while teaching them to focus on the feeling of pain and accept it rather than fight it. According to Cabot, the patients in the medical clinic have cancer, Aids, and chronic illnesses and if we think that we can do something for them, we are in trouble. However, if we change the point of reference and accept the idea that they can help themselves, if we provide them with effective tools, then the situation will change exceptionally.
Recently Cabot examined a group of patients with psoriasis, which is a skin disease that has no cure and which requires hospitalization, protection of the eyes, and standing naked in a room exposed to ultraviolet radiation. The treatment inspires pressure and anxiety among the patients. Cabot chose a number of them and taught them meditation techniques to reduce the anxiety. In two experiments he conducted, he discovered that the skin of the patients meditating was healed four times as fast as that of the other patients. In another research, he injected an influenza vaccination into two groups of subjects and measured the amount of antibodies they developed in their blood, and the brain activity of the patients new to meditation. The findings showed that not only the patients who engaged in meditation developed a greater number of antibodies but also those patients whose minds had succeeded in conveying the most of the activity from the right lobe to the left lobe evinced even higher levels of antibodies. The better the meditation technique, according to Cabot, the stronger the immune system. Meditation is an adventure, the greatest adventure that the human consciousness can choose. Meditation is only being without doing – no action, no thought, no emotion. You only exist, and this is a supreme pleasure. The essential core, the soul of meditation, is to observe, to know yourself (Osho, 1997).
Integrated medicine is medicine that incorporates treatment methods from all four of the dimensions that compromise the whole person. Meditation is a treatment method that enables a person to observe and know himself and consequently practice and train the spiritual dimension (the free will) in each one of the 32 intelligences (Lousky, 2005).

Relationship between Meditation and Intelligences