WHY PRAYER COULD BE GOOD MEDICINE

Neuroscientists are documenting changes in brain scans of meditating Tibetan Buddhists and praying nuns. They are trying to see whether meditation/prayer has meaning to people that translates into biology and affects a disease process.

Prayer and faith speeded recovery in illnesses ranging from depression to stroke to heart attack. Medical acceptance has grown along with solid scientific data on prayer’s impact on health. About 75% of studies of spirituality have confirmed health benefits. If prayers were available in pill form, no pharmacy could stock enough of it.

Scientists and spiritualists in general believe that GOD heals people in supernatural ways, but Science cannot shape a study to prove it. But we now know enough, based on solid research to say that meditation and prayer, much like exercise and diet, has a connection with better health.

Is prayer good medicine?

Dozens of studies have shown that individuals, who pray regularly and attend religious services, stay healthier and livelonger than those who rarely or never do – even when age, health, habits, demographics and other factors are considered. Prayer – Whether for oneself (petitionary prayer) or others (intercessory prayer) – affects the quality, if not quantity of life. It boosts morale, lower agitation, and loneliness and life dissatisfaction and enhances the ability to cope in men, women, the elderly, the young, the healthy and the sick. Another study has found that those who prayed regularly had significantly lower blood pressure than the less religious. A third study showed that those who attended religious services had healthier immune systems than those who did not. In studies at several medical centers, meditation/prayer and faith have been shown to speed recovery from depression, alcoholism, hip surgery, and drug addiction, stroke, rheumatoid arthritis, heart attacks and bypass surgery. Those who pray stay healthier and live longer than those who don’t.

How does prayer do these things?

Some scientists speculate that meditation/prayer may foster a state of peace and calm that could lead to beneficial changes in the cardiovascular and immune systems. Using sophisticated brain-imaging techniques, Dr. Andy Newberg of the university of Pennsylvania, author of “Why God won’t go away” has documented changes in blood flow in particular regions of the brain during prayer and meditation. This could be the link between religion and health benefits such as lower blood pressure, slower heart rates, decreased anxiety and an enhanced sense of well-being.

Can prayer heal others?

At nine medical centers around the country, 750 patients with potentially life- threatening heart problems participated in the MANTRA (Chant) project, a recently concluded randomized trial of intercessory prayer or distant healing. The names of half the patients were given to groups – including Carmelite nuns, Buddhist monks, Sufi Muslims and Evangelical Congregations- who prayed for their recovery. In the next few months they found that in a pilot study, prayer recipients had 50% to 100% fewer complications.

Skeptics remain dubious, “The premise behind distant healing is not scientific.” Even writers on spirituality, concede that science may never prove that prayer can heal others. That does not mean that people should not take advantage of this wonderful tool that is right at their fingertips.

LIVE AND LET LIVE CONCEPTS: –
Cliché not to interfere with other people’s business or preferences. I don’t care what they do! Live and let live, I always say. Your parents are strict. Mine just live and let live.

Believing that other people should be allowed to live their lives in the way that they want to, They seem as a society to have a very live and let live attitude towards issues like gay rights.

To accept other people as they are, although they may have a different way of life, I firmly believe in live and let live, and if people don’t rob, cheat or beat their wives, I have no complaints.

An idiom expressing the modern concept that one should let others live their lives as they see fit.

Live and let live is the spontaneous rise of non-aggressive co-operative behavior that developed during the First World War particularly during prolonged periods of Trench Warfare on the Western Front. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of this is the Christmas Truce of 1914. In the early months of immobile trench warfare, the truces were not unique to the Christmas period, and reflected a growing mood of “live and let live”, where infantry units in close proximity to each other would stop overtly aggressive behavior, and often engage in small-scale fraternization, engaging in conversation or bartering for cigarettes.

It is a process that can be characterised as the deliberate abstaining from the use of violence during war. Sometimes it can take the form of over truces or pacts negotiated locally by soldiers. At other times it can be a tacit behaviour— sometimes characterised as “letting sleeping dogs lie”—whereby both sides refrain from firing or using their weapons, or deliberately discharge them in a ritualistic or routine way that signals their non-lethal intent.

Live and Let Live: – A form of the Golden Rule

When we live and let live, we don’t need to criticize, judge, or condemn others. We have no need to control them or try and make them conform to our way of thinking. We let others live their own lives and we live ours.

This simple slogan helps center us on our own recovery and on living our own life in the best way we know how. Live and let live is one of the keys to peace in our lives. When we practice tolerance in our lives we are liberated to work on our own issues. When we use this slogan we end many of the conflicts in our lives and gain the ability to stop new ones before they build into big ones.

Benefits with friends: –

Having good friends and a close family may prolong life, according to an analysis of 148 studies that focused on relationships. The studies assessed the strength of a person’s social ties by looking at factors including marital status, household size, participation in group activities, number of social contacts, and self-reported levels of support or isolation. Overall participants (average age 65) with strong social ties increased their odds of survival by 50%, over an average age 7 1⁄2 year period, compared with those who were more isolated. The authors found that healthy social relations are as good for you as quitting smoking and better for you than exercising or loosing weight. Of course doing all those health-promoting things while friends and families support you would be better still.

FINAL FAITH OR BELIEF: –
Psychologists often carve thinking into two broad categories: intuitive think- ing, which is fast and effortless (instantly knowing whether someone is angry or sad from the look on her face, for example); and analytic thinking, which is slower and more deliberate (and used for solving math problems and other tricky tasks). Both kinds of thinking have their strengths and weaknesses, and they often seem to interfere with one another. Recently there’s been an emerg- ing consensus among researchers that a lot of religious beliefs are grounded in intuitive processes.

To Gervais and Norenzayan, the findings suggest that intuitive thinking, likely along with other cognitive and cultural factors, is a key ingredient in religious belief. Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are in- tuitively receptive to religion. If you’re going to be unreligious, it’s likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe. “In some ways this confirms what many people, both religious and non- religious, have said about religious belief for a long time, that it’s more of a feeling than a thought,” says Nicholas Epley, a psychologist at the Uni- versity of Chicago. But he predicts the findings won’t change anyone’s mind about whether God exists or whether religious belief is rational. “If you think that reasoning analytically is the way to go about understanding the world ac- curately, you might see this as evidence that being religious doesn’t make much sense,” he says. “If you’re a religious person, I think you take this evidence as showing that God has given you a system for belief that just reveals itself to you as common sense.”

Make a Difference: –

“We can all make a difference…. What is required is that we have faith in GOD that everything that is happening in our life is for our highest good. As we live in that positive mode, we are able to bring happiness and joy into any atmosphere.”

There is part of you that is perfect and pure. It is untouched by the less than perfect characteristics you’ve acquired by living in a less than perfect world. It is filled with divine qualities, so is a constant state of resourcefulness and well- being. Its total absence of conflict and negativity of any sort makes this part of you a Still-Point; a deep, enriching experience of Silence.

Make time to practice reaching this inner place of Silence. It will bring you untold benefit.

Belief Power: –

So why do you have so many beliefs? And why is the world not becoming a better place with so many believers? To answer this question, we need to go back to the moment of ‘truth’ which was lost to our awareness…some time ago. Beliefs are only present because we have lost our connection with the eternal truths, and our awareness of those truths. For example, while you be- lieve you are what you see in the bathroom mirror in the morning, it is not the truth of who you really are. You are not your physical form – you are simply spirit, or that which animates the form. The experience (not the belief) of this truth liberates you from the fear of ageing and decay. Spirit (self) does not grow old and does not die. But then, you must not believe me (or disbelieve me). When you experience, there is no longer a need to believe, because now you know…THE TRUTH. This is why belief is not the truth and why truth is more powerful than belief, and why belief and truth are never found in bed together. So what is the truth? Are you a physical being having the oc- casional spiritual experience, or are you a spiritual being had a physical expe- rience. If you say both that’s called avoidance!

The Final Analysis: –

People are often unreasonable, self-centered: Forgive them anyway. If you are Honest, People may cheat you, but be Honest anyway.

What you spend years to build, someone could destroy overnight. Build any- way.

The good you do today, People will often forget tomorrow. Do Good anyway.

You see, in the final analysis it is between you and GOD; it never was between you and them anyway.

Why worry, have faith: –

I can make a hobby out of worrying. I worry about the noise and then complain when it is too quiet. I worry about having too many sunny dry spells and then complain when it rains. I may even be worried about worrying too much. It is essential to take an honest interest in what goes on around me, and of course it is always wise to analyze a situation and take the necessary precautions to avoid being influenced by anything negative. However, when all is said and done, my tense and burdened mind will not be able to function clearly enough to arrive at a suitable solution to a problem. Maybe I should just do the best that I can and beyond that leave it in the hands of GOD. To have faith in the self, faith in GOD and faith in GOD’s plan is a sure way to remain clear and free of burdens.

Eye of Faith: –

When I am continuously being battered by the storms of life, and my very spirit is ebbing away, then all I need to do is hang onto that gift called ‘Faith’, that one support which will weather the storms. Faith does not depend on a clever head, only belief: belief in the self and the strength that lies within. Faith is the seed of victory and the foundation of making the impossible possible.

“Faith is not blind. Faith is seeing with the eyes of the mind. Even as we have two physical eyes with which we are able to see wonderful things that are around us- trees, flowers, stars, streams, hills and dales, forests and mountains, even so with the eyes of faith we can perceive goodness, peace and calm around us.”