Mediatation and relaxation training - Essay Example

a. Meditation and yoga greatly helps people to reduce stress and improve their focus in life. Medical studies have proven that both these stress reduction methods provides essential benefits that include reduction in behavioral impairments induced by stress, such as enhanced energy and enthusiasm for life, improved self-esteem, and escalated capacity to cope both short and long-term stressful situations more effectively. They also provide equip the body with the ability to withstand diseases and stress.

They endow our body with lasting decreases in physical and psychological symptoms in diseases, an increased ability to relax during stressful situations, reductions in pain levels, and an enhanced ability to cope with chronic and recurring pain (Relax for Success, 2006). In the biobehavioral model, the body responds to the wear and tear that stress produces. When demands and pressures coming from external or internal stimuli get out of hand, the stress response becomes either extremely intense, occurs very often, or endures extensively.

At this point the physical and mental symptoms makes things even worse by becoming sources of demand and pressure in and of themselves (Stress Directions, 2007). Both meditation and yoga gives us enhanced awareness and learning to relate directly to whatever is happening in your life. It gives a person a power to take charge in his life, and the ability to do things for yourself that no other else can do for you. Most people have been encountering loss of awareness to things outside our body and even within.

This “mindlessness” makes us forgetful. It also urges us to feel that we are separated from ourselves—leading us to think that we are living life mechanically. By being aware of the presence and symptoms of stress, our body can respond appropriately to “mindlessness” Mindfulness is already within us, all we have to do is to reawaken this innate capacity in us to be released so that it would be used for us to learn, grow, and heal from physical, psychological and behavioral problems.

Meditation, yoga and other relaxation techniques teach the body to be aware of the presence of stress. These methods also instruct the body to respond appropriately and promptly to stress stimuli. b. Meditation, though has religious roots, has now been scientifically proven to effectively reduce the debilitating and dangerous effects of stress. Though science is an objective study of facts that encompasses the different religious practices and beliefs, they probe on things and knowledge on things that are beneficial and productive for our body.

Through logic and experimentation, science has proven that meditation and yoga actually works. Though some religions do not have background knowledge on meditation and yoga, they have rough counterparts for these practices. Christianity, for example, does not directly mention the term and concept of meditation. However, Christ teaches his followers to pray, fast and to self-contemplate—activities that provide similar effect to our body as that of meditation and yoga. Moslems also practice their own variant of meditation.

They practice contemplation, or tafakkur in the Qur’an (Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, n.d.). ReferencesMaulana Wahiduddin Khan (n.d.) Meditation in Islam Retrieved June 6, 2007 from http://www.alrisala.org/Articles/mysticism/meditation.htm.Relax for Success (2006), Benefits of Meditation, Retrieved June 6, 2007 from http://www.relaxforsuccess.com/52.html?sm=33459.Stress Directions (2007), The Biobehavioral Model of Stress, Retrieved June 6, 2007 from http://stressdirections.com/content/view/34/57/.

University of Massachusetts—Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (CFM) (n.d.), Stress Reduction Program, Retrieved June 6, 2007 from http://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/srp/index.aspx.