Meditation
Breathe deeply, empty your mind, relax. Meditation, or "mindfulness" is credited with stress reduction and improving health and happiness levels. Some ME recovery stories (yes, occasionally people do recover!) include meditation as one of the means to becoming well again.
Jon Kabat-Zinn's 2-CD set, "Mindfulness for Beginners" is the best introduction to meditation I've found. Kabat-Zinn is not to be confused with all the 'new age' gurus out there; he holds a PhD in molecular biology from MIT, and founded the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (wikipedia).
For those who like to meditate to music, my favourites at the moment are: Latif Bolat: Let There be Love; Krishna Das: One Track Heart; and Amar Nath: Rain Melody. Sometimes I listen to Shakti Gawain's Creative Visualization Meditations, but sometimes I find her a bit too much new age fluff for my liking.
What's your favourite music to meditate to? Or maybe you prefer listening to the wind and birds outside the window? Share your thoughts and music using the comment button below!
2 comments:
I find Pachelbel's Canon very conducive to meditative practice.
I'm loving your blog which I found just minutes ago. I also have ME and worked during the 90s in the NFP sector in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kenya and Tanzania. Sistah!
I am reminded of trying to find out the cause of immense, enduring fatigue some years back. Finally, having managed to get an MD to run some basic bloodwork, she gave me the results, saying something to the effect "Fatigue is the most common complaint that brings patients in to see doctors. Usually we can't identify the cause." And with that, she was done with me. No hint of how to pursue a solution to my problem. No sympathetic glance. I was dismissed. After I had left the examining room and was about to exit the office, she mumbled, "I see that you were somewhat anemic last year, but of course you knew about that." Except that the doctor who had seen me the previous year when I was having severe perimenopausal out-of-control bleeding had never mentioned my iron levels... The fatigue became compounded by the depression that accompanied my "failure" at identifying an avenue to well-being as a result of what sounded like a "well, just go and rot for all I care" attitude of the MD. Well, the story has a few more chapters, but my point is not to compare my health issues with yours, but to let you know I have some basis for empathy for you! And to mention that Shakti Gawain has/had a home on the north shore of Kauai, and Latif Bolat performs on Kauai every year. Since Kauai is known as a place of healers, it was interesting to see the Kauai connections in your meditation practice!
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