Natural Healing: Medical Meditation for Healing

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Medical mediation can help patients through intuitive, self-healing.

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In Western medicine, we are generally taught to look to outside sources for treatment of our illnesses or injuries. Going to the doctor usually means getting a diagnosis and a prescription for a pharmaceutical drug. But what if an additional part of the prescription was up to you—that you had some responsibility for your own healing?

At the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, patients suffering from everything from heart disease and cancer to skin disorders and anxiety commit to eight-week courses to “work on themselves” with meditation and relaxation. And in Tucson at the Miraval Life in Balance Resort, Dharma Singh Khalsa, author of Meditation as Medicine (Pocket Books, 2001) and president and director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Foundation, is prescribing “medical meditation” to his patients—specific meditation prescriptions for patients based on their ailments.

“The body can heal itself if given the chance,” says Khalsa, who combines Eastern healing with his Western-medicine background. “Meditation is the most potent form of natural healing.”

In research from the Stress Reduction Clinic, patients who have completed the program have a greater ability to engage in their own ongoing wellness through mindfulness—the foundation of all work done at the clinic. The majority of patients completing the program report a decrease in both physical and psychological symptoms, and pain levels improve.

Judith Orloff, M.D., a psychiatrist, intuitive, and author of A Guide to Intuitive Healing (Three Rivers, 2001), says that meditation is one of the major ways to access intuition. “Getting quiet and listening to the still, small voice inside lets you go in and connect with your own spirit and intuition,” she says.

It’s all about looking inside yourself and trusting the feelings that arise as answers to your own healing, Orloff says. Orloff teaches her patients to ask questions not to their minds but to their inner voices, such as “Is this treatment (medication, et cetera) right for me?” Intuitive answers for healing may arise from this inner dialogue.

As an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, Orloff often works with people suffering from panic disorders and has found that meditation helps alleviate panic and anxiety. A 1995 study at the Stress Reduction Clinic showed that twenty subjects demonstrated significant reductions in anxiety and panic after eight weeks of mindfulness meditation.

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