Meditation will help in the cure of almost any type of disease because it involves activating your vital energies, but the * Big One * we should focus on is how it can help when someone has CANCER.
Probably the most advanced book on cancer and alternative treatments is John Boik's "Cancer and Natural Medicine," which is endorsed by several physicians. It provides you with all sorts of information on alternative remedies for cancer as well as survival rate statistics that your doctor is not likely to give you.
In his book, Boik mentions the Australian psychiatrist Ainslie Meares who found that the most effective form of healing meditation for cancer patients was intensive sessions of imageless meditation, meaning "emptiness meditation" or "meditation without thought." This was the type of meditation that got the best results when people were using meditation in conjunction with modern medicine to treat their cancer.
Meares found that meditation definitely reduced the anxiety, depression and pain of those with cancer, inhibited the growth of tumors in 10% of the cases he studied ("spontaneous remissions" came in at the 10% mark due to meditation), improved the quality of life in 50% of the cases, produced significantly longer survival rates and facilitated death with dignity in 90% of the cases.
All these things were possible because in emptiness meditation you let go of your thoughts to realize some stage of mental emptiness (free of discriminative thought). The mental stillness or "emptiness" of this state will cause your "yang chi" to arise, which is the natural vitality of your body, and so when your yang chi arises it can cure all sorts of illnesses.
Remember the principle that yang arises from the stillness of yin and so by cultivating mental stillness, emptiness or peacefulness, the calmness of meditation will kick off the activation of your kundalini life force that produces healing.
That's how meditation can cure.
Acupuncture, for instance, is a medical technique designed to help the chi in your body to get moving again when it's stuck or obstructed, which often happens with cancer patients and in lots of other diseases. When your chi travels freely without obstructions, which is the natural result of meditation, this is a state of maximum health. In fact, you're only truly free of disease when you reach the third dhyana.
When you let go of a habit or thought that you've been clinging to for decades, this, too, can finally free your yang chi so that it can arise and produce a "spontaneous cure," which researchers like LeShan and Schulze have noted. That's why people who hate their careers but who get cancer, and who then finally say "the heck with it" and chuck what they've hated but forced themselves to continue doing for decades, experience spontaneous remissions.
Finally the natural chi flow of their body, which they have been artificially holding back for years, can assume its natural circulation, and with this return to normality comes their cure. People who let go of the burden of wrong habits experience the same sort of thing.
In other words, if you build an artificial cocoon of chi around yourself from forced habits, and which in turn inhibits your vital energies and natural joy for life, then you are going to get sick. You might not get cancer, and you might not get sick tomorrow, but you're going to get sick. Meditation is the only thing that helps you get rid of those solidified energy cocoons you've created for yourself so as to restore a natural chi flow to your body.
Meares encouraged "effortless stilling of the mind" and discouraged the sort of active visualization and imagery methods proposed by psychologists today. So the route of "guided imagery" for cancer was not his top recommendation. Neither is it ours.
Meares found that those who got the best results with their cancer had three attributes in common: their meditation was profound and prolonged (the patients he studied attended at least 20 sessions of intensive meditation), there was little or no conscious activity during meditation (that's "emptiness meditation"), and they carried meditation into their daily lives.
Now these three points are exactly the same thing that Buddhism says one should do in order to facilitate getting well. For cancer specifically, a famous Buddhist meditation is to sit quietly, adjust your body and breathing so that they both calm down, and then visualize giving away all your dirty flesh to hungry beings who want to eat it. Next after your flesh is gone, you imaging becoming a pure white skeleton which then transforms into dust and then emptiness.
When you get to that emptiness, just let go of everything and stay there. The longer you stay there in that stay of unknowing, the easier it will be for your yang chi to arise and produce its wonders. That's how you get superpowers, that's how you climb the ranks of spirituality, that's how you dissolve away old habits you want to get rid of, that's how you banish sickness and increase your longevity.
This particular meditation, called the white skeleton meditation, and two dozen others are found in my book "Twenty-Five Doors to Meditation" that you can get on amazon.com. If you are interested, just go to the MeditationExpert website, click on the products page and you'll see a description of this book.
Another Eastern meditation technique for cancer and other diseases is to visualize that your body burns away or is burned by light and you become light only. After awhile, that light turns into emptiness. Of course, people with very high wisdom go directly to the emptiness-light stage of this practice, and they don't visualize it but just let it be so.
Another adjunct technique is to practice the 9-bottled wind breathing method, which is explained in "Twenty-Five Doors to Meditation", and to visualize dirty things leaving your body on exhalation. As you breathe out and walk around, you must also imagine that you and your body dissolve and become empty so that nothing is there. You have to forget the existence of your body and then once again your yang chi can arise.
Yet another method is to imagine that your body becomes a giant silvery sun (whether it is burnt up, dissolves into the sun or just becomes a sun is up to you), and recite the Vairocana 5-element mantra: "Ah Bee Lah Hung! Cht!" After you've visualized being a silvery sun for awhile, you become light and then emptiness and forget everything. Remember that a sun doesn't have arms or ears or a body but it just brilliant silver light, and that which knows the light is just empty knowing without a body.
All these methods have one thing in common that the researcher Ainslie Meares found-that cultivating emptiness, which is the "absence of discriminative thought," is the most powerful type of meditation for healing. It's more powerful than thought-filled meditation like positive thinking or guided imagery.
When I asked Zen master Nan Huai Chin why emptiness meditation is the most powerful one for healing in spite of the fact that the Esoteric and yoga schools have thousands of visualization techniques, he said it's because "the power of Emptiness can destroy all bad things and set up all new things; cultivating Emptiness is the Great vehicle whereas visualization techniques and other cultivation methods are the small vehicle. That's why it's always the most powerful technique."
So now you know the main meditation route for healing, which is the same route for spiritual progress or the mundane goal of changing your habits and behavior. You now also know why it works, so the most important thing to do is to put it into practice and send this information to your friends so that they have it when they need it.
Naturally there are also other meditation techniques specific for high blood pressure and other diseases, and we'll get to them in time but this first you need to know this granddaddy method of them all.
Article by The Meditation Expert. Read more and take advantage of many free resources at the website.
