Mindfulness and Healing

Where have you spent the last 24 hours? How often was your mind aware of your body? If you’re not in your body, where are you? Probably at home when you’re at work, and at the grocery store when you’re at home, and with your kids, your spouse, your parents, orphans in Africa, soldiers in Iraq, and many other places.

Sometimes pain is a reflection of this fractured consciousness. Although it seems counterintuitive to bring awareness back to what seems to be the source of the pain—the body—actually, it’s a profound learning experience that can dramatically reduce pain.

In Transformation and Healing, Thich Nhat Hanh gives easy-to-follow exercises and identifies several benefits of mindfulness: calming the body and becoming aware of where the body is, what it’s doing, and how the parts interrelate.

Calming the body reduces pain that comes from tension and anxiety. Becoming better aware of body position and action gives the opportunity to prevent the continual microtrauma that we inflict on ourselves everyday. Reflecting on the body parts individually and collectively increases pleasant feelings from the many places in the body that are working well and not hurting.

I first learned how powerful meditation can be from a nurse who discovered this method to relieve her back pain. She credits non-judgmental awareness with developing inner awareness. What could be better for your health? She now offers meditation courses and has an information-packed website. http://www.grow-aware.com

Bringing attention to your breath is powerful. It reflexively brings calm and energy. Meditation doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

Thanks for the Body

I hope you enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving! We have so much to be grateful for, it’s wonderful to have a day devoted to appreciation for our abundance.

This good fortune extends to our bodies, even though we tend to notice the wrinkles and aches more than the miraculous, coordinated functioning of multiple systems. Here’s a little meditation I try to incorporate into my life once a week. I try to connect with each part of my body as I offer it gratitude.

Breathe in. Thank-you, lungs for processing oxygen every minute, every day. I couldn’t live without you. And, heart, you beat consistently giving blood and oxygen to every cell. Arteries and veins, the highways of the body, you connect every cell to my life force. Kidneys, you purify my blood. Blood, colorful cells and plasma, giving and receiving continuously. Thank-you.

Organs. The liver, you keep me safe from toxins in a complicated process beyond my understanding. Pancreas and spleen, I don’t even know what you do, but I know it’s important and am thankful nonetheless. Stomach, intestines, gall bladder, I thank you for helping me digest nutrition from the world and eliminate what I don’t need. Skin, you protect me from the elements, keep me safe inside.

My glands: pituitary, pineal, thymus, thyroid, adrenal. You are beyond my comprehension, regulating systems without requiring my knowledge. My reproductive organs have given me my precious boys and remind me of my gender and need to slow down once a month.

My brain, a coordinator and multi-tasker. The spinal cord and nerves that run the relay to take in and disperse information. Thank-you.

Bones, strong bones, that keep me standing. I’m glad I’m not an amoeba. Muscles, tendons, ligaments, and connective tissue that give me the ability to move and do.

I’m in awe of everything that makes me ME. How effortlessly all the parts work in harmony to create life. I’ll try not to take you for granted, to give you what you need, and show my appreciation.