Can it be used to reduce and control pain?
Will it help with acute pain?
Can it be help to manage chronic pain?
Do you need to be an experienced and long-time meditator to use it for pain management?
Research has shown us that meditation can be remarkably effective at reducing and managing pain, to increase recovery time after illness and surgery and to bring down stress levels.
How does pain meditation work?
- It calms you down by de-stressing your body and nervous system, which is the foundation of pain management. Pain is a major stressor the more stressed the more depressed, anxious, angry and fatigued you become. Your tolerance to the pain decreases, which creates a negative feedback loop.
- The more important advantage of meditation is on the emotional and cognitive levels. It becomes possible to separate the sensation of pain from the emotional and rational connotations we tend to attach to pain.
Patients were examined by undergoing ASL MRI or arterial spin labelling magnetic resonance imaging, which could track brain activity over longer periods of time. The results showed that meditation calms the parts of the brain that responds to pain while stimulating the parts that cope with and reduce pain.
Dr Fadel Zeidan, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, North Carolina.
Activity in the somatosensory cortex decreased significantly where the location and intensity of pain are processed and activity in the anterior insula and cingulate cortex and the orbito-frontal cortex increased, which affects emotional reactiveness and the autonomic nervous system switching on your inbuilt relaxation mechanism and natural pain killers…endorphins!
These results were applicable not only in acute but also in chronic cases.
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Never meditated before?
The good news is that you don’t have to be a long time meditation practitioner to benefit from pain meditation. A few hours of deep relaxation training, spread over a few days, will achieve dramatic results.
It is essentially important to deeply relax your body laying down as comfortable as possible. The more you de-stress your body the greater affect on your emotional state and thinking.
It is a good idea to meditate an average of 20 minutes a day or if you find it difficult to stay still for that long a period, try doing two 10 minutes sessions a day.
If you are a novice and feel unsure if you will be able to do meditation on your own, we created powerful healing meditation Mp3’s and CD’s to help you.
Pain Management and Healing is specifically for pain and uses Alpha brainwave entrainment to help you get into a deeply relaxed state and guided imagery plus suggestions to encourage healing, stress reduction and positive feelings.
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Buy the Pain Management and Healing CD $29.95
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Buy the Pain Management and Healing MP3 $14.95
Visit our meditation page to see our collection of mp3’s and cd’s if you want to learn more about meditation.