Friday, March 20, 2020

Threat, Stress, COVID-19 & Meditation: Useful, Useless, Or...?

Now having seen several offers of "meditations for coronavirus" online and having a) been in the practice of vipassana meditation since 1975, and b) considerable formal education and experience on such matters, may I offer the following?
Meditation may have value with regard to the desensitization of the amygdalarhypothalamic > pituitary > adrenal axis and its direct effects upon the general adaptation syndrome or stress response. Which -- if sustained -- leads to allostatic loading and suppression of the normal functions of the body's immune system. (The very high incidence of hypertension in the measured comorbidity of COVID deaths in New York through early April is a strong indicator of allostatic loading, by the way.)
BUT the only way I know for a fact how meditation would be beneficial is if the practitioner "digested" and "discharged" any unprocessed affective energy in the neural feedback loops in the brain's limbic system. And that can only occur if the practitioner feels whatever affective sensations are dis-cover-ed via attending to his or her interoceptive experience.
I am not here to assert that guided imagery or posthypnotic suggestions are useless or futile in such circumstances. They may well be; I don't presume to know. But I do know that what I have described above and in the links that follow does produce results that -- according to published, peer-reviewed, empirical research -- are (among other things) correlated at least with reduced incidence of infection as well as reduced symptom severity.
With respect to stress reduction, one may also wish to consider the information at this link: "As One Thinks so Shall One Feel." And How One Can Change All That, and the use of introspection to monitor one's thoughts and their relationship to one's emotions... and stress response.

Resources: See Benson, McEwen, Sapolsky, Selye, and Wolpe in A CPTSD Library... and How Self-Awareness Works to Digest Emotional Pain.

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