Meditation: Day Seven

The 8 Minute Meditation program provides 8 different ways to meditate.  However, its author, Davich, suggests that the novice practitioner at least remain with each meditation method for at least a week in order to give it a chance to be effective.  The seventh day of the breath meditation was interesting in that it gave me the opportunity to see its effectiveness in action.

I came home from a day trip from George West with my wife, Valerie.  George West is just North of us in Texas about two hours away.  It is two hours of flat Texas brush land, interrupted by the small town with its speed traps and town squares.  It was a clear day and the sun was particularly brutal on my eyes.  I had spent good deal of the morning outside driving and then walking around a neighborhood just off downtown George West taking photographs.  It is little wonder that a small migraine erupted by the time Valerie and I returned home.

I slept some of the day, which is my usual method of ridding myself of pesky headaches, a kind of drunk man’s remedy of sleeping off the problem.  However, the headache had been persistent and stayed with me, may have even woke me from my nap so that it was there when a rose at nine o’clock at night.

I was reluctant to proceed with my thirty day meditation experiment, the old “I have a headache” excuse actualized.  But then, I thought, “No, I have committed myself to thirty days of this program.  And so, from my bed, I did my meditation. 

The thing that surprised me, the thing I didn’t expect, is that after doing the meditation, my headache had been somewhat tamped down, almost gone.  In the past, when I have had a migraine, I have turned off the lights and hid myself under a pillow which failed to provide any real relief.  However, somehow, in meditating my headache had almost disappeared as if I had taken aspirin or some other pain reliever.

And it is little surprise.  A study has shown that a whopping 72% of people who suffer from chronic pain and who used meditation technics reported significant reductions in the pain suffered.  Another study showed that migraine sufferers who practice meditation suffer from less migraines, enhanced their pain tolerance, and reported a greater sense of well-being.  See here.

As 8 minutes is not that long a period of time, it might be a better method of dealing with headaches than polluting the body with pain pills, and it is a method I probably look to in order to relieve headaches in the future.