Meditate or Medicate?

Meditate or Medicate?
Which would you rather do if you could have the choice?  For many years I thought I could help my patients with the best medicine available. I chose to ignore the power of meditation in that time. I thought it wouldn’t make as much of difference as medication or a supplement would.

Then I reached a point in my own life where I realized I would have to do something to keep me centered and calm so I could do a better job. I started to meditate. I’ve been meditating most days for several years now. I find that it really has helped me in all the ways people talk about. I’m calmer, more loving, feel more able to access my higher self and feel over all more joyful. Then the fires happened and I felt compelled to offer a way for people to heal from the trauma of natural disasters. I interviewed over 20 experts for the event on all sorts of subjects related to healing. Almost every one of them talked about the power of breath work, meditation or some other calming techniques. One of my speakers did a study on the the victims of a huge fire in Canada two years ago. Meditation helped them recover from the PTSD.

We’ve all heard about it. A study reported in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2008 showed that 40 out of 60 patients who began doing this were able to stop taking their blood pressure medications (Huffington Post, 2014)! Other studies have shown that doing this does in fact slow the aging process by effecting brain physiology. It can also help balance hormones, improve sleep, slows down aging and helps your immune system!! What ELSE will it do?

If you haven’t started a daily meditation regime, now is the time! If you think adding just ONE MORE thing to your day will push you over the edge – start with just 2 minutes a day. When I first started, I used a device by Heart Math – which I just plugged into my iPhone – and committed to doing it for 3 minutes a day. Here’s a link to their device – Inner Balance . But there are many free apps available on your smart phone as well. Slowly I started to want to spend more time at it and I built myself up to 15-20 minutes a day most days.

If you do decide to try this yourself, first consider that it has to be doable. Try to commit to only a short time each day and build up. It takes 90 days for you to develop a habit, so keep at it for 90 days, even if only for two or three minutes a day. Let me know what you think once you’ve done this for a while.

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Shiroko Sokitch, MD
March 22, 2018 at 09:45PM

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