HEALTH AND WELLNESS : Cancer – Cancer Healing and Meditation

By His Grace and Blessings, I write….

Cancer Healing and Meditation

The modern lifestyles are giving us a taste of our own medicine. It has become so difficult to get stress out of our systems and it does not require rocket science to understand its origins. To make long story short, stress is an outcome of our modern lifestyles and a major or in fact the main reason for many of the sicknesses of our body and mind. For as mysterious as it may sound, a deep connect exists between stress and cancer. This blog of mine will try to address this connect between stress and cancer on the one hand, and effects of meditation on stress and thereby healing of cancer on the other. So, let me take you through this journey where I will shed light on the devil, i.e. cancer, the devil’s advocate i.e. stress and the remedy i.e. meditation….

What is Cancer;

To repeat from my previous blogs, cancer is nothing but a condition in which a cell becomes malignant due to some faulty mutation, and it then uncontrollably starts spreading to the other healthy cells of the body. The body’s immune system gets compromised and is unable to kill this malignant cell.

Stress; the cause of cancer

One of the reasons why cells become malignant is because of chronic inflammation. Most of the times inflammation is a creation of our toxic thought processes which emanate from unfounded and irrational fears of our modern-day lifestyles. It results into chronic stressful conditions disturbing the rhythmic cycles of cortisol, the stress hormones. By giving our bodies a perennially toxic environment, cortisol impairs the immune response systems and promotes tumour growth. Sometimes, stress may a product of our environment, our food, or our sedentary lifestyles.

According to Matthieu Ricard (considered to be the happiest man on the earth, who is a Buddhist monk and a former molecular biologist from Pasteur Institute, France) stress eats into our immunity systems. Stress hormones that are released have been found to be directly correlated to birth and promotion of cancer cells. There is thus always a stress- mind connect to cancer.

Meditation and its impact;

Mindfulness or meditation is the best way to break this negative mind- cancer connect. Meditation is a mind body practice in which a person focuses his or her attention on something, mostly on his breathing, to minimize distracting or stressful thoughts or feelings. Research has established that meditation helps in normalising day-night cortisol rhythm, shifts the autonomic nervous systems to parasympathetic activation. In doing so, the patient is reducing the inflammation of the body thus halting the birth, growth and spread of cancer cells. Moreover, meditation helps in overcoming the side effects of chemotherapy and other conventional cancer treatments. Meditation is a type of complementary and alternative medicine to treating cancer.

However, to realise benefits of meditation one must consistently practise it and show perseverance. Initially it may be difficult to calm a distractive mind. Gradually with a calmer and relaxed mind, your body tissues are less inflamed. There will be remission and reduction of tumours and integrative therapies with meditation as central part of the strategy can yield astounding results.

By His Grace and Blessings, I write….

Dr. Seema Chaudhary