Meditation training resources

Mindfulness meditation and health

Mindfulness training which is at the heart of meditation can directly enhance our experience of wholeness and wellbeing. Our word for health is based on a word for wholeness (it's right there in the dictionary!). We can always experience wholeness more fully – whether we see ourselves as being ‘well’ or ‘unwell’. In fact, our experience of wellbeing is largely based on this feeling of ‘wholeness’.

We all know of course that when we face problems we can get stressed. This also goes for health problems, either our own or our loved ones'. When we get stressed one of the things which happens is that we tend to see the problem, and our options to respond to it, in limited ways. Our minds can close in and get caught up in limiting views of ourselves and the possibilities open to us. We can see ourselves as ‘sick’, or we might see our situation as ‘hopeless’. We may feel guilt, blame, resignation, frustration, resentment or anger.

By developing mindfulness we can learn to look at our perceptions when we are feeling stuck in this way more clearly. We may well see that our minds are either too speedy – too much worry, or too dull – not really wanting to be involved. Either way, as we become more stressed we become split off from the situation as it actually is. Often enough, we also split off from our own sense of well-being. We can lose touch with our sense of wholeness.

Meditation can bring us right back to this sense of wholeness. This is so whether our health actually improves or not. Some people living with chronic severe pain, for example, have experienced a reduction in their pain after only a few weeks of mindfulness training. Others may experience that, although the pain has not changed much, they can walk and move much more easily and live more joyfully because they are less preoccupied with the pain and the sometimes difficult emotions connected with it.

It is worth drawing a distinction between healing and curing (or 'fixing'). Some of the situations in which we experience stress can take years to resolve, if indeed they can be resolved at all. A chronic or terminal illness, for example, may never be cured. But just by making the effort to practice mindfulness we can reduce stress as we become more aware of the thoughts and situations which feed our stress responses. This means that the healing benefits of increased mindfulness can be felt long before any particular stressful situation is entirely resolved. We can experience healing, i.e. increased well-being and increased acceptance of where we actually are, whether or not curing an illness or ‘fixing’ a stressful situation can be accomplished.

Through the mindfulness training that is at the heart of meditation, our minds naturally become more calm. As our minds begin to calm, we can take the first steps in regaining a sense of wholeness in our lives. We begin to see things more as they are, less coloured and obscured by our own hopes and fears. When we look at a situation, too often we perceive our ideas about the situation, not the situation as it is. These ideas and associated feelings are not necessarily helpful. As we develop mindfulness, we can begin to be free of the problem, or at least we can become free of some of the ways in which it was thought to limit us. We can see and think about the situation more clearly, we can communicate about it more effectively to our doctors and to those close to us. We can begin to live and work more creatively with the situation as it actually is.

To see a situation clearly we have to accept it for what it is. Some people feel that accepting a challenging situation goes against the grain, as though in accepting a difficult situation we were somehow admitting defeat. Our fight and flight instincts can be very strong. Our stories often involve ‘fighting’ the problem, not ‘giving in’. There are of course meditations in which people visualise their illness as some kind of dark force or monster which then gets zapped in some way, much as in a game of space invaders perhaps. This kind of meditation is fine as far as it goes. Those who feel this practice to be of benefit should continue with it.

However, in mindfulness training we can in fact go deeper by learning to accept a situation, along with all our reactions to it. Learning to accept a challenging situation with openness and kindness to ourselves and others is a middle way between capitulation and aggression. Along with learning to accept the situation, we also accept and open ourselves to our own experience of wholeness in our lives. We can learn to experience this wholeness at least to some degree no matter what problems we may be facing. In doing so, we often feel that we regain a sense of agency in our lives, that more options are open to us. This is quite a different experience, of course, to being passively subject to an illness, and perhaps also being a passive subject to the doctors’ or other practitioners' treatments.

The point in all this is so simple that most of us overlook it much of the time: however 'well' or 'unwell' we may be, we always contain at least some wellness and wholeness in ourselves. We do not have to somehow add wholeness to the situation by whatever means, it is already there. By becoming more mindful we experience layers of our being which are not nearly so caught up in our ideas about how things are, or how they should be. With mindfulness training we begin to see the stories we get caught up in (‘I can’t do this’, ‘I have to fight this’, or ‘you should do that’ etc). We learn to drop many of the stories and the dramas. We learn to see that we can live more fully by developing mindfulness and learning to move into these deeper experiences of wellbeing.

Whatever our level of physical health may be, we can always experience more health in our lives – emotional, mental and perhaps also physical health. Mindfulness training is a very effective and well-tried vehicle with which to set about this journey.

Many of the themes in this article are discussed in more detail in Kabat-Zinn's book Full catastrophe living - see references.