MEDITATION, PSYCHOTHERAPY AND HEALING
Traditionally, meditation has been viewed as a spiritual practice involving a mental discipline in which one attempts to realize or consider or reflect upon a religious truth in order to arrive at a personal understanding and love for what it signifies; however, in the behavioral and medical sciences, the practice is increasingly being claimed as a stress-reduction technique that enhances both physical and psychological healing and well-being (Astin, 1997). The purpose of this paper is to examine the empirical research on meditation and psychotherapy in order to evaluate the validity of this claim.
Effects of Meditation and Psychotherapy on Healing
Does meditation increase the healing power of psychotherapy? Answering this question is difficult for two reasons. First, there has not been a great deal of research examining for the conjoint effects of psychotherapy and meditation; and second, the research that does exist suffers from problematic methodology.
One problem with the existing research supporting the efficacy of conjoint meditation and psychotherapy treatment is that many of these studies were conducted by clinicians using only case study methods which are research approaches lacking in empirical rigor (Kiess & Bloomquist, 1985). For example, Urbanowski and Miller (1996) discussed five case studies in which psychotherapy and meditation techniques were used conjointly for clients with diverse problems.
It was stated that the conjoint use of meditation and psychotherapy developed clients' ego strength as well as provided them with meaningful experiences of egolessness, and it was further noted that this remained true, even for clients who were the survivors of strong trauma. It was concluded that the combined treatment of meditation with psychotherapy may decrease mental health care utilization, yet enhance the psychotherapeutic process in this era of managed care a...