Our 20th anniversary e-book—available as a free download to our Supporting and Sustaining Members to thank them for twenty great years—contains some of our most popular authors and teachers on some of the most pressing topics of the day.
Mindfulness teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn is one of those teachers. In “Healing Mind, Healing Body,” he writes about a study that looked at the effects of meditation on psoriasis. One treatment used to cure psoriasis is phototherapy, the use of UV light to target abnormalities on the skin. Kabat-Zinn writes:
It struck me that the phototherapy paradigm was perfect for studying the important question of whether and how the mind might influence healing; in this case, a healing process that we could see and photograph and track over time. Why not train his psoriasis patients in these mindfulness-based methods as part of a controlled study to see whether we could detect effects of the mind itself on the rate of skin clearing?
Meditation’s place in the sciences—if indeed it has one—was a controversial one when this article first appeared in 2005, and it remains so today. Read the whole article here, and to read many other articles like it, join the Tricycle Community as a Supporting or Sustaining Member. Already a member? Get your free e-book here.