My Experience Healing Myself with Mindfulness

Image: Kris Shankar

Following my recent posts on mindfulness and healing, a number of people have reached out to me with how their practice of meditation has helped them. A daily mindfulness routine has helped them resolve of a range of problems they attribute to stress, including heart arrythmia, anxiety attacks and epileptic seizures. We are familiar with stressful events having an immediate, short-term impact on our heart rate or digestion, but how quickly can constant or unrelenting stress result in chronic health conditions that become our lifelong companions? And, using the power of the mind, can we “consciously” heal ourselves? I’ll share two personal experiences from years ago that hint at the answer.

Back in 2004, I discovered neurofeedback, a form of brainwave training. With this technique, sensors at various locations on your scalp read the frequency of your brainwaves and these signals into a simple video game, such as a car driving down a road. The screen dims if your brain isn’t emitting waves at a target frequency (for ex., 12 Hz) that the therapist has dialed in. It turns out that your brain likes perfection, in this case a bright and clearly visible screen, and unconsciously shifts to the desired frequency to maximize its reward. With multiple training sessions, the brain is able to effortlessly stay in the target frequency range in the midst of daily activity.

Brainwave training has been used to increase focus while staying calm by NASA pilots, by the Navy Seals, business executives, and sports figures like beach volleyballer and Olympic gold medalist Kerry Walsh Jennings. It has also been used to treat conditions like ADHD. I started working with a neurofeedback practitioner in Bellevue, WA, with the same goals of achieving focused and calm productivity in the face of workplace stress — in other words, as a short cut to mindfulness.

The clinician identified a target frequency and we set about training my brain to stay in that range. The results were quick and dramatic. In as little as two sessions, I was in a state of continuous flow, and able to function with significantly greater efficiency and calm at work. That’s when the clinician dialed up the training frequency by ½ hertz, believing it would help me.

In hindsight, both he and I realized this was a mistake. It turns out I was already at the right frequency and highly sensitive to changes. After a couple of sessions at the higher frequency, I transformed into a high-strung and jittery individual, always on edge. I felt as if I was on a perpetual caffeine high, something like the equivalent of a half-dozen double shot espressos. My wife Bhavna remarked that I seemed like a completely different person, and indeed, I felt like a stranger to myself. My resting blood pressure and pulse, normally a low 100 / 60 / 65 bpm, was now significantly higher, shooting up to as high as 120 / 80 / 90 bpm. I stopped the sessions with the therapist, but the symptoms did not abate. It was a stark and first-hand experience of how quickly being always “wound up” can leave a permanent mark upon one’s health.

It was a couple of weeks later that I found myself up at 3 am at night feeling especially on edge. Upon measurement, my vital signs registered at 115 / 76 /80 bpm. I decided that enough was enough. The brainwave training sessions had significantly enhanced my ability to focus, and I would now focus intensely on calming down. Putting aside the ironies and contradictions in this statement, here’s what happened next. Within a minute of willing myself to calm down, I broke into a cold sweat. A light-headed sensation came over me and I felt like I might pass out at any minute. I hastily took another measurement. 70 / 35 / 60. I was in disbelief. All it had taken was focused intent for my blood pressure to plunge to dangerously low levels in the space of a minute. It was a clear demonstration of the power of mind over body. (It took till morning for my BP to climb back up and stabilize at my original baseline level.)

My second anecdote is from further in the past, when I was dealing with the stress of finishing up graduate school. I started suffered from a series of migraines that year. Each episode would commence with strange wavy patterns and blank spaces in my field of vision, and progress to the debilitating pain and light sensitivity characteristic of migraines. I’d also discovered meditation that year. So, when I felt yet another migraine set in with its telltale symptoms, some intuition told me sit in a dark room with closed eyes and be mindful of it. As I sat cross-legged in silence and watched the sensations in my head with a detached but keen awareness, the wavy patterns in my field of vision slowly diminished. Instead of strengthening its vise-like grip and turning into excruciating pain, the tightening knot above my left eye simply dissolved. The migraine just melted away. I’ve never had a migraine since, for which I am deeply thankful.

My takeaway from these experiences is that stress can rapidly push your body off balance, while focused intent and mindfulness can bring about equally rapid and dramatic improvement. Oh, and one more thing — I have learned to treat shortcuts to mindfulness like neurofeedback with due respect.

Post-Script: We are conditioned to think that involuntary parameters like BP and heart rate cannot be changed directly by the mind, but research over the last few decades clearly indicates otherwise. A fascinating Harvard study from the 1990s documented that Tibetan monks trained in a technique called Tum-mo meditation could raise their body temperature by as much as 17 degrees and reduce their oxygen consumption by 64% in the span of a few hours, with no obvious discomfort or ill-effects.

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