Meditation Patient Views

I have also found mindfulness and meditation so helpful. It took a few months of regular and ongoing practice to feel the benefits, but the benefits have been impactful 💕

The only way I made improvement with similar symptoms was I laid in a dark room with a sleep mask on trying to meditate for many hours of the days for a few months.

Thanks for sharing. When you say meditation group do you mean it’s a guided meditation or just meditating as a group or a discussion? I’ve never participated in one so idk how that works.

I agree. I've been doing meditation and yoga nidra for nearly 4 years now. It certainly hasn't cured any symptoms for me, but it has helped me rest and sleep better. I put on a pain meditation video every night to help get me to sleep. It's free and causes no harm, so nothing to lose.

In terms of helping it.. number one for me is energy management. Then after that, I find my body is always incredibly tense for whatever reason. I spend a lot of time focusing on relaxing my body, trying to be mindful. I find that guided meditations, especially bodyscans are incredibly helpful to maintain a relaxed state. That helps a lot over the long term.

I meditate a lot. It seems to be one of the only things that consistently helps.

I agree, meditation and mindfulness has really helped me. 🫶🏽❤️‍🩹🫶🏽

Yes, but 2pm for the patient. The patient has to sleep and sometimes get some relief from that, but not always. Sometimes it just drags on but usually passes by 8pm. It's really debilitating and the patient doesn't have a normal life. The patient had to stop working in the afternoon/evening. The patient has had it all of their adult life and has been trying hard to find a cause/solution for this for the last 5 years as it seems to have worsened.

4 doctors, a psychiatrist, 2 therapists, an acupuncturist, 2 traditional Asian medicine therapists, a pranic energy healer.. The patient has tried a lot. The patient is currently working with a neurological department at a hospital who are treating it as a 'channelopathy' but it is early in the treatment stages. They have begun by trying 600-800mg of magnesium a day. The patient thinks it reduces the severity of the episodes but it's hard to say. It isn't a cure.

The patient has had all possible blood tests more than once. The patient has tried stimulants, which seem to make it worse. Diet, sleep, exercise and current medications don't seem to have much influence. The patient has found no pattern. It's very frustrating.

But this is the really interesting bit. The patient recently did a 2-week meditation retreat in a Buddhist temple. They meditated generally between 6-10 hours a day. After the first day the problem had completely gone. Yeah. No fatigue, no brain fog, no weakness, no need to nap, no feeling as though the patient's nervous system had been poisoned.

The patient is pretty sure it was the meditation itself that helped as many other factors remained the same, although there were some differences. The patient got up at 4am every day. Their sleep during the retreat was a little shorter than usual at about 6 hours a night. They ate 2 vegetarian meals a day - breakfast at 6am and lunch at 10am. Nothing after midday. Meals included carbs, sugar, some gluten etc. The patient drank the usual amount of coffee. They moved slowly, and rarely, if ever, had a raised heart rate but with walking meditation they still covered 10,000 steps a day.

There were no phones, internet, electronic devices etc. for the duration. There wasn't much talking although they chanted daily. The patient was peaceful and without the usual everyday worries. With meditation there is a lot less 'thinking' and more kind of awareness of thoughts, and emotions arising. The patient would guess that's the main thing. The mind wasn't constantly worrying, predicting, planning, rehearsing, regretting etc. All that takes a lot of energy. This kind of relates to the neurologist at the hospital's suggestion that the patient was simply running out of something in the brain at a certain point each day. The patient spoke to the monk about it and he advised they should try to find their true Self. You may have to find your own understanding of that.

Unfortunately the problem came back after a couple of days following the retreat. The patient hasn't been able to keep up a meditation practice to see if a couple of hours a day within normal life would work. That's their next step, they suppose. 6+ hours is not really practical. But they will take this new information to their next hospital appointment in about a week and see what they think about it. They'll try to update what they find.

Meditation and breath work really help me. If I'm consistent with it I notice a huge difference.

Yes, I have had good results with loving kindness meditation. Even if my mind is all over the place (as is the usual), it does bring a more peaceful mindset.

Just focusing on my breath isn't that great for me, I get distracted almost immediately, so the way loving kindness is more focused on "objects" seems to help too.