Healing Meditation

Meditation technique repairs the brain processes that aspartame destroys

A wonderful article about meditation from Natural News.

Research has shown that with as few as 11 hours of mindful meditation, the white matter of the brain that aspartame destroys, can begin to grow back. Research into the brain damage that aspartame causes, has revealed lesions to the nerve fibers known as white matter. This is due to the by-products created when aspartame is ingested, namely methanol and formaldehyde. The effects of ingesting these chemicals are so serious that they cause symptoms often mistaken for multiple sclerosis. Other artificial sweeteners such as neotame, which have the same by-products, have the same effects.

An example is the destruction of the white matter in the anterior cingulate region which causes a lack of nerve activity in this area. This is associated with mental problems such as ADHD, ADD, dementia, depression and schizophrenia. Test subjects reported reduced feelings of anger, depression, anxiety and fatigue and had reduced levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. The changes include the improvement of mood, which in turn is consistent with self regulation being a core feature of many mental health problems.

The meditation and body movement training used in the tests is known as integrative body-mind training (IBMT). It is a form of meditation and mindfulness training adapted from Chinese medicine. By activating the areas of the brain that lack sufficient white matter, the brain grows new nerve fibers as a response. It gives a new perspective on how brain function can be improved with the use of inexpensive therapy instead of using expensive drugs.

The value of meditation is being recognized by mainstream mental health research

With meditation therapy gaining greater recognition among doctors in the field of mental health, more studies are being commissioned. These studies and research projects are currently exposing some interesting and exiting effects, some of which are the cures for traditionally incurable conditions. Children with autism spectrum disorders, ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and ADD (attention deficit disorder) benefit from the nerve fiber generating effects of meditation, allowing them greater control, better mood and improved social response.

With so many people consuming greater quantities of aspartame and other brain destroying food additives and vaccines, it is no surprise that there is such a rise in depression, behavior disorders and violent behavior. The studies that have proven the link between aspartame and the destruction of brain nerve fibers, raise very serious questions as to the long-term health and social effects of drugging the population through the food supply. However, the studies that have proven the effects of meditation in re-growing these nerve fibers give hope to those who have been affected. By abstaining from aspartame-containing products, and using meditation, the damage can be reversed. This would allow affected people to become less aggressive, more thoughtful and be much more emotionally stable. This would result in reduced need for the dangerous and expensive drug treatments such as Ritalin and Prozac.

It is only a matter of time before the pharmaceutical industry release a "study" which "proves" that only drugs can be proven effective, and meditation is all mumbo jumbo. But this will be because they are defending the one thing they care most about, profit.

Below is about another Study done in 2011 about meditation's healing power.

A little over an hour of meditation produces powerful pain-relieving effects in the brain, a new study shows. "This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation," said Fadel Zeidan, who led the study.

"We found a big effect - about a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness," added Zeidan, post-doctoral research fellow at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre.

"Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other pain-relieving drugs, which typically reduce pain ratings by about 25 percent," said Zeidan, reports the Journal of Neuroscience.

For the study, a group of healthy volunteers who had never meditated attended four, 20-minute classes to learn a meditation technique known as focused attention, according to a Wake Forest statement.

Focused attention is a form of mindfulness meditation where people are taught to attend to the breath and let go of distracting thoughts and emotions.

Both before and after meditation training, participants' brain activity was examined using a special type of imaging -- arterial spin labelling magnetic resonance imaging (ASL MRI) -- that captures longer duration brain processes, such as meditation, better than a standard MRI scan of brain function.

During these scans, a pain-inducing heat device was placed on the participants' right legs. This device heated a small area of their skin to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that most people find painful, over a five-minute period.

The scans taken after meditation training showed that every participant's pain ratings were reduced, with decreases ranging from 11 to 93 percent, Zeidan said.(IANS)