(health & WELLNESS
The Po wer
of Medita tion
How you can find your focus
and reduce stress.
by EMILY ANTONEN, LMT, CNMT
iIf you worry about how diabetes may affect your
future, meditation can help dispel that anxiety.
“Meditation is a generalized de-stressing technique
that releases you from your thinking machine, from
that restless voice inside your head that never lets up
except when you’re asleep or unconscious,” says June
Biermann, author of The Diabetic’s Total Health and
Happiness Book. “What we particularly like about
meditation is that if you give it a try, it can bring you
a wonderful respite from that problem you carry
around all your waking hours—your diabetes. If you
practice meditation consistently, it can change not
just your physiology but your entire life.”
Besides helping you tolerate uncertainty and deal
with fear, meditation also encourages you to live in
the present moment and be more accepting of day-to-day difficulties, especially those connected with
diabetes. By shifting your mental focus, meditation
may also increase your brain mass and enhance your
senses. A study of 20 people in Boston showed that
regular practitioners of meditation developed an
increased thickness in the brain regions that relate
to sensory, auditory, and visual perception, as well
as internal perception—the automatic monitoring of
heart rate or breathing.
