There are very real positive improvements from mindfulness meditation and the other mind-body-awareness training, like yoga and tai chi. I'll have to see if I can locate some links to articles on the tai chi side of things to share. These are scientific/medical studies that show results for arthritis, fibromyalgia, etc. And there is a new article to be published soon, where I've made a small contribution on the positive impacts on anxiety. I will have to say, that I've found that it takes some time to see results... and this isn't like a one-time fix, cure-all. It's more a lifestyle change and practice needs to be ongoing... to keep the effect going.
I learned mindfulness mediation maybe 15-20 years ago, in a silent retreat led by a couple of psychologists... that are probably associated one way or another with the folks mentioned in the article. At the time, it was still pretty new agey... not taken seriously... and I found myself to feel that way about it also. It was in this retreat that I gave up meditation - because the only "result" I got was one of continuously streaming tears. Of course, the leaders didn't have the time to help me figure out the source of this and I completely misread the reasons too - I thought of course, that this was a "wrong" result; that the crying was bad and I wasn't meditating correctly... and it was another 10 years or so before I found out the huge pool of grief I had, and why. Looking back, I kind of think that if I'd kept up with it I might have "broken through" a lot sooner.
There are so many mysteries about how our brains work. And these kinds of more "alternative" types of help actually do provide benefits - for whatever reason (I'm thinking placebo effect which is now being looked at as being a "real" effect). I had to laugh, when my T began showing me that I could finally use all that meditation training that I'd been through and discarded as useless, just a bit differently to finally heal. Sans medication, too, I might add.
