Spiritual Health

In a clinical situation if an intervention carried out to access, maintain or, improve the health of a person then it is called as Clinical Intervention. These interventions are carried out to accelerate the healing of any injure or accelerate the curing of any diseases.

Meditation is an ancient spiritual practice. It is a modern mind body technique for relaxation of the body and calmness of the mind. The East Asian countries especially Japan, China and India are considered to be the origin of meditation. Meditation in other forms has existed in other parts of the world too. Meditation has been practiced since ages with the religious point of concern. There have been many health benefits that are associated with meditation but this has been recognized and brought to limelight only recently.

Before 30years meditation was only considered a religious practice and the medical fraternity that totally believed in allopathic medicines did not consider meditation appropriate for health care setting. The acceptance of meditation as a clinical intervention became inevitable after Dr. Herbert Benson published his research work that showed the benefits of meditation. This research work was published in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 1970. The Kaiser Permanente and VA clinics prescribe meditation as technique for calming the mind as well as relaxing the body.

Most of the spiritual practices and religions support the practice of concentration meditation in which the meditator has to concentrate or focus the attention on an external or inter objet. The distractions should be minimized to help concentrating on the object that is chosen. The most commonly used form of concentration meditation is the repetitive prayer.

The articles written by Dr. Herbert Benson in support of meditation as a clinical intervention were published in the Scientific American and the American Journal of Physiology. His studies revealed that meditation reduces stress.

The “fight-or-flight” response of the nervous system is activated under the influence of stress. This response is very important for surviving in any circumstances but if this activity is repeated a number of times then it is harmful to body. If stress increases there is an increase in the activity of the sympathetic nervous system. This leads to increase in the rate of respiration and heart beat. This increases the blood pressure and even the consumption of oxygen in the body. Most of the researchers believe that most of the people suffer from hypertension and cardiac ailments just because of increase in the level of stress.

Dr. Benson has shown that meditation reduces the:

· heart beat

· rate of respiration

· blood pressure

· consumption of oxygen and

· Tension in the muscles.