many people, then, meditation has been enough in their quest for sustainable good health. Practiced regularly, meditation frees them from the bondage of stress, allows them to relax, to regain balance, and so enjoy life to the fullest. Do use this basic self-help technique and make it a part of your life. The benefits will repay the initial effort.
The Traditional Role Of Meditation
As we seek to adapt this ancient technique into a modern context, and apply it specifically in a therapeutic setting, it may well be helpful to understand meditation in its historical context, to consider and be informed by some of its traditional techniques.
Meditation has been practiced for thousands of years in all major cultures and traditions, primarily as a major tool on the spiritual path. It has been well said that meditation provides a reliable means through which we can come to know our own minds more fully. Meditation is an ideal technique to call upon when we are interested to examine the question of who we really are, and delightfully, history tells us that reliably it does lead to satisfying answers. Appendix C offers an insight into the traditional role of meditation and some of its key techniques. The book I cowrote with my colleague Paul Bedson, Meditation—An In-depth Guide,7 is a good reference point.
Personally, I feel very grateful for having close contact with and learning from a wide range of extraordinary meditation teachers over many years. Initially there was Dr. Meares, and more recently Sogyal Rinpoche, an authentically trained Tibetan master of meditation who has provided me with the rare opportunity to access ancient and authentic wisdom teachings that marry so well with modern needs. Then, too, I have learned so much from the many thousands of people who I have taught to meditate over the years. What I can offer here is a testament to all these great teachers.
What Does Meditation Offer to those with Cancer?
I had been fortunate to develop my cancer at a time when Dr. Ainslie Meares first contemplated the use of meditation for people affected by cancer. I had an emerging interest in the traditional forms of meditation and felt that these principles should be able to restore the inner harmony I felt I had lost. I believed if I could regain that inner harmony, it would be reflected on the outer physical level. Dr. Meares’ idea was that the meditation would relieve anxiety and stress. This would lead to a reduction in the levels of cortisone in my body and so allow my immune system to operate normally. Then my body would remove the tumors itself. It would return to normal. Putting it all together sounded good to me!
As I have practiced meditation more and come to see others benefit from it too, there do appear to be two broad areas of benefit. Meditation increases quality of life and quantity of life. In my experience, people who meditate regularly do feel better, and they do live longer.
Considering quality of life first, we see benefits on all levels of human experience. There are physical, emotional, mental and spiritual gains.
Physical Benefits
Chronic physical tension is a symptom of stress that we know inhibits the body’s natural function. Meditation relieves physical tension. Many people are struck by how good their body feels once this tension is removed. They realize just how much tension they had before learning to meditate in this way. While previously they had come to accept the tension as normal, now they realize just how unpleasant it really was.
Athletes have found meditation can increase their performance and certainly most people find their general efficiency in day-to-day tasks goes up extraordinarily once they begin to meditate. Consistently, heart rates go down, and even severely elevated blood pressure can return to normal. A typical example was Dr. Colin, who joined our group not with cancer but as an interested observer, and found much to his surprise that meditation and diet brought his severely elevated blood pressure back to normal within two months.
Emotional Benefits
Emotionally, our own level of ease is greatly improved through meditation. People find that they feel better about themselves. They feel more able to accept their limitations and to use their strengths positively. In so doing, they are more able to relate to other people in an open, honest and meaningful way.
Any cancer patient knows that being just that—a cancer patient—has its problems. Before cancer was diagnosed, you may have been a doctor, a teacher, a housewife, whatever. So often after diagnosis, to your friends you are now a cancer patient first and foremost, and everything else comes a poor second. This can cause much awkwardness and can become quite a cause for anxiety in itself. However, it is remarkable how meditation reliably leads to an acceptance of the situation and an openness that is infectious, putting everyone at ease.
Also, many people find meditation reduces any feelings of guilt and negative emotion they may have. As a consequence, they develop a greater capacity for loving. While this often results in an improved quality of sexual love, it also improves that more erudite, selfless love and compassion for all. People find they are able to feel good about themselves to a higher degree and, in doing so, give of themselves more safely and freely, and to be of more help to those around them.
Mental Benefits
Mental anxiety, if present, hinders all aspects of our being. Its causes are endless, often unidentifiable. Frequently, psychiatrists have spent long hours raking over the traumas of the past in a quest for the elusive cause of present anxieties. From the womb, to birth, the formative years, adolescence and beyond, all manner of incidents can be identified as potential causes for anxiety and stress. Even if the cause is identified, treatment often remains difficult.
Here is a vivid example. The Lancaster bombers of World War II had their rear ends protected by tail gunners. These men climbed into the tail section of the plane via a ladder. They lay down in the cramped fuselage and then had a Perspex bubble slammed tight around them. Their only communication with the rest of the crew was by headphone. They then set off on an incredibly rough ride with little to dwell upon except their solitary machine guns and the fact that on average they could expect to survive about two missions. An extreme and obvious cause for anxiety. It was not surprising then to find that after the war those who did survive frequently felt great tension when they were confined in small spaces. Many of these men found great difficulty in relaxing enough to urinate when in the narrow confines of a toilet! Frequently they knew the cause of their problem as did all who tried to relieve their anxiety. What happened? The problem remained and invariably they needed to leave the toilet door open!
There are two principles operating here. First, just knowing the cause of a problem is not necessarily enough to relieve it; an appropriate technique is also important. Second, if those men could not have related their inability to go to the toilet to their wartime experiences, they would have felt a great deal more anxiety and suffered greater distress.
Actually, it was with these very tail gunners that Dr. Meares began his foray into the realm of stress and anxiety. He found the standard psychiatric techniques of the postwar period were of little help to these men, but that hypnotherapy brought rapid relief. Dr. Meares went on to become a world authority in hypnotherapy and it was through this interest he came across meditation and pioneered its therapeutic use.
What he realized was that in seeking health, we need to understand as much about our situation as possible, as well as having appropriate techniques to deal with it. We benefit greatly from our own realization of what a constant effort it is to live with the pressure created by persistent anxiety. It is like trying to keep the lid on a pressure cooker all the time. It tires us physically, emotionally and mentally. However, once that anxiety is relieved, we feel benefits all through and our physical symptoms soon respond.
Perhaps Dr. Meares’ greatest contribution has been to show that meditation reliably
