Meditate Your Pain Away
According to a new Canadian study you can meditate your pain away. How? A study by Montreal University researchers’ points out that Zen meditation can help people regain mental, physical and emotional balance, and reduce pain.
As per the results of the study those who practice Zen meditation exhibit lower pain sensitivity (during and after meditation) compared to people who do not meditate.
The difference between previous studies and the new one lies in that the former have shown that teaching chronic pain patients to meditate is beneficial. But, very few studies of these have looked at pain processing in healthy, highly trained meditators. The new study was a first step in determining how or why meditation might influence pain perception.
The researchers selected a sample of 13 people who had practiced Zen meditation for at least 1,000 hours and 13 non-meditators to undergo a pain test, as part of their study.
The administered pain test was a simple one. First, a thermal heat source, a computer controlled heating plate, was pressed against the calves of subjects intermittently at varying temperatures. The heat levels began at 43 degrees Celsius and went to a maximum of 53 degrees Celsius depending on each participant’s sensitivity. Quite a few of the meditators tolerated the maximum temperature, but all control subjects were well below 53 degrees Celsius.
On comparing the reaction of the twp groups it was found that Zen meditators exhibited much lower pain sensitivity even without meditating, compared to non-meditators.
In fact, during meditation, Zen meditators even further reduced their pain through slower breathing as their breath rate dropped to 12 per minute versus 15 breaths for non-meditators.
Slower breathing certainly coincided with reduced pain and may even influence pain by keeping the body in a relaxed state. While previous studies have found that the emotional aspects of pain are influenced by meditation, we found that the sensation itself, as well as the emotional response, is different in meditators.
On the whole, the study found that Zen meditators experienced an 18 percent reduction in pain intensity.
Breast Cosmetics from St.Botanica
Write a Comment