Many times we have shown you how meditation is very useful in many fields of existence.
Ancient art rediscovered from relatively little in the West, never ceases to amaze for the physical and mental benefits it gives: from reducing anxiety to improving one's approach to work, it can contribute, even decisively, to raising the quality of our life.
However, the experimentation we want to talk about in this article goes beyond its most well-known applications, entering a context where it really seems difficult to imagine it: the army .
Soldiers in meditation school
A very recent study of the faculty of medicine of the Naval Health Center Research of the University of San Diego has given very interesting results regarding the meditation. The experimentation was in fact carried out on quite anomalous subjects: the US navy soldiers particularly exposed to disorders such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress .
The type of meditation chosen is mindfulness and the Marines of the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton platoons were chosen as the subjects operating in conditions of great stress. In the first part of the course the soldiers were instructed about meditation, encouraged to listen to the sensations of the body carefully and encouraged to do exercises at home.
In the second part, there was the support with the control group, that is with colleagues who had not learned any notions about mindfulness and both simulated a situation of high tension, a fight in the Middle East with lots of patrols, meetings with the village chief and an ambush.
Was the response of two groups different? Well yes: from a purely medical point of view those who had followed the meditation course recorded a greater speed of return to the optimal basal levels of heart and respiratory frequency and an improvement in the immune function .
On an emotional level we leave the word to the dott. Martin Paulus, professor of psychiatry and one of the authors of the research: " Being able to re-adjust activity in these areas with so little training is the most significant result of this study. Mindfulness helps the body to optimize its stress response, helping the body to interpret stressful events as bodily sensations. The brain adds less emotional influences to the experiences and this helps to recover from stress ".
Further confirmation of the benefits of meditation
The study that we have shown to you goes only to add material to what has already emerged from numerous other researches. Unfortunately in Italy it is very difficult to break those mental categories, frankly obsolete, which oppose to this kind of techniques an ill-concealed mistrust or a hasty provision.
The purpose of practitioners and operators in the sector is precisely to undermine these mechanisms through in- depth information and constant practice, without becoming discouraged in the face of skepticism or mistrust.
It is enough to open some non-Italian sites or study the research of many authoritative institutes to understand that elsewhere it is much further and that there, simply, the future has already arrived.
