MBSR to Cure Troubled Minds?
WEDNESDAY, 25 JULY 2007
Mindfulness meditation, or popularly known as Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in psychiatric parlance, has been used to cure medical disorders such as stress, chronic pain, depression, fibromyalgia, and eating disorders. However, in a review published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, most studies conducted on the use of MBSR failed to demonstrate it as a reliable primary method of treating these conditions. On the other hand, the risk of relapse of successfully treated clinical depression was lowered when MBSR was utilized.
Despite the disappointing reports for meditation enthusiasts, a historical perspective sheds its light on the matter. According to an eminent mind-body researcher Prof. Jon Kab Zinn at-of the University of Massachusetts Medical School Center for Mindfulness, mindfulness mediation is the awareness that emerges through paying attention to purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to the experience of unfolding, moment by moment. Awareness, as defined in eastern cultures is the process of shifting the world-view from earthly mundane matters, through progressive levels of detachment, to gain a supra-ordinal view (the wholeness and inter-connectedness of things).
For author Sudip Ghosh, on meditation, to use it for curing psycho-social disorders is detracting from the very basis of meditation. If one meditates solely to get rid of depression or anxiety, it is then a desire to ‘escape’ from the problem rather than to work for solving it, which is essentially a a biochemical imbalance in the brain. In this case according to Ghosh, MBSR research into illnesses can therefore be an incorrect approach to the whole process of meditation in itself.
Source:
http://brainblogger.com
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