Zen Meditation for Fibromyalgia Pain

I have just read an abstract from the American Psychology Association entitled "Cortical thickness and pain sensitivity in zen meditators".

Why does this interest me? Because, since being diagnosed with Fibromyalgia and for many years prior to diagnosis, I've been searching for ways to rid myself of the pain that rules my life. I've been looking for, in particular, ways to reduce the amount of pain I live with on a daily basis. Yes, we can take a pill or eight, we can go through expensive phisiotherapy or other treatments with little or no lasting effectiveness.

What this article is suggesting is that by utilizing and "practicing" Zen Meditation, you can reduce the severity of the pain signals in your brain and raise your tolerence to pain so that long-term practice of meditation can effect the level of pain experienced.

The results of the study found that a group of 17 meditators compared to a group of 18 control subjects (non-meditators) had significantly reduced their pain sensitivity by practicing meditation daily.

Meditators were found to have thicker cortex in the dorsal anterior cingulate and bilaterally in secondary somatosensory cortex. Lower pain sensitivity was associated with thicker cortex in affective, pain-related brain regions. Results suggest that pain sensitivity is related to cortical thickness in those pain-related brain regions and the lower sensitivity observed in meditators could be the product of alterations to brain morphometry from long-term meditation practice.

Overall I have found this to be true, but one thing is clear, practicing meditation can take a short while to get the hang of and for chronic pain sufferers it should be used in conjunction with other types of energy healing modalities, of which I have found Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) to much more effective on the time element as it can get to the root of emotional traumas easier and much faster, together with the fact that EFT is much faster to get the hang of and there are simply 1000's of free and low cost resources to help find the quickest route to emotional freedom.
I'm not saying that Fibromyalgia is all in your head (NO-WAY!), but I believe it can be triggered by emotional trauma and stress. Free Energy Healing is in my opinion, the best way to treat Fibromyalgia as long as you can stay focused on your goals and be consistant & congruent.




Article:
Cortical thickness and pain sensitivity in zen meditators.
Grant JA, Courtemanche J, Duerden EG, Duncan GH, Rainville P.

Département de physiologie, Université de Montréal Centre de recherche en science neurologiques, Montréal, QC, Canada. joshua.grant@umontreal.ca
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2010-01983-010