Healing With the Power of Meditation: How to Heal Your Body With Your Mind

People struggling with chronic pain or other medical conditions can use healing meditation to feel better in body and spirit. Some report dramatic results from healing meditation, while others simply appreciate the reduction in stress that comes from sitting quietly and focusing the mind.

If you were to ask me what the most important experience of my life has been, I would say it was learning to meditate. Meditation has been the key to my creativity, wellbeing, and happiness.

Meditation takes us from daily stress into silence, providing our body a very deep level of rest. Rest is how the body heals itself, which it does by throwing off the stress, fatigue, and toxins accumulated during our daily life. The silence of pure awareness is extremely refreshing to the mind, which finds it increasingly easy not to cling to old thought-patterns; rigid habits of thinking and feeling begin to fall away of their own accord. When this happens, the mind is actually learning to heal itself.

The most important health benefits associated with meditation are stress reduction, better sleep, lower blood pressure, improved cardiovascular function, improved immunity, and the ability to stay centered in the midst of all the turmoil that’s going on around you. Meditation helps you do less and accomplish more.

During meditation, you are not forcing your mind to be noiseless; you are experiencing the silence and stillness that is placed beyond the background static of worry, resentment, wishful thinking, fantasy, unfulfilled hopes, and vague dreams in your head. Meditation brings us home to the serenity of present-moment awareness. It gives us a direct experience of our Spirit and in the process dissolves the impurities which are preventing Spirit from shining forth in our lives.

In meditation we disrupt the unconscious development of thoughts and emotions by focusing on a new object of attention. In the meditation technique, the “object of attention” is a mantra that we repeat silently to ourselves. A mantra is pure sound, without meaning or emotional charge to trigger associations. It allows the mind to detach from its typical preoccupations and experience the spaciousness and calmness within.

Even more important than what we experience during our meditation sessions is the effect they have on the remaining hours of our day. With a regular meditation practice, life’s inevitable stresses no longer have the power to throw us into chaotic mind-states, and all of our thoughts, actions, and reactions are infused with greater love, calm, and joy.

There is a simple but powerful self-healing meditation that can be done whenever you feel the need to boost your immune system. It is specifically effective if used when you feel the first symptoms of an illness, but it also works with illnesses that are already entrenched if you use it at regular intervals and with an intense focus. It will also counteract any disruption of your energy field by some form of negativity. However, it is not a substitute for the moment-to-moment practice of being in the body; otherwise, its effect will only be short-term. Here it is.

When you are unoccupied for a few minutes, and especially last thing at night before drifting off to sleep and first thing in the morning before getting up, “flood” your body with consciousness.

Close your eyes. Lie flat on your back. Choose different parts of your body to focus your attention on briefly at first: hands, feet, arms, legs, abdomen, chest, head, and so on. Feel the life energy inside those parts as intensely as you can. Stay with each part for fifteen seconds or so. Then let your attention run through the body like a wave a few times, from feet to head and back again. This need only take a minute or so. After that, feel the inner body in its totality, as a single field of energy. Hold that feeling for a few minutes. Be intensely present throughout that time, present in every cell of your body. Don’t be concerned if the mind occasionally succeeds in drawing your attention from the body and you lose yourself in some thought. As soon as you notice that this has happened, just give back your attention to the inner body.