Mindfulness Meditation Interventions for Long COVID: Biobehavioral Gene Expression and Neuroimmune Functioning (2022) Porter & Jason

Agreed. It is pleasant. It can help you feel a little more in control. It can make you feel more relaxed, certainly. But it's not a medical treatment, and most serious practitioners of meditation would agree.

 

I had been practising various mediation techniques for some fifteen years prior to the onset of my ME, but my ME ultimately interfered with a regular practice some five plus years in.

Meditation as a word refers to a very ‘fuzzy set’ indeed. Some would argue that meditation techniques are not meditation but rather blunt instruments aimed at creating a suitable stitustion for meditation to arise. Further serious practitioners of meditation in traditional yoga, Hindu or Buddhist traditions would consider it is something that takes years, decades or even life times to master.

Within classical yoga traditions mental health issues are a contra indicator for practicing meditation, and posture work is seen as precursor for practicing meditation techniques. Depending on their theoretical framework some would argue that being able to sit upright unsupported is a necessary component of any meditation technique which would make it inaccessible to anyone with very severe and perhaps severe ME or Long Covid. It is important to remember that meditation techniques will have an energy demand and can if one accesses distressing memories or has a ‘bad trip’ be also emotionally exhausting. I have also come across examples of misuse of meditation techniques being associated with triggering mental health crises.

My understanding is that ‘mindfulness’ is just one approach to meditation that several Buddhist groups that sought to develop as a form of Buddhist practice that was less culturally dependant on its ‘Eastern’ roots and more palatable to the western market. These groups used it either as gateway to Buddhism or a deliberate marketing strategy to lure people in, depending on how cynically you want to describe it. What I did miss out on was the transition from a few Buddhist psychologists and doctors speculating to the widespread use of mindfulness in many health and education settings, in part because my ME effectively took me out of both meditation and health settings, so there is a big gap in my experience relating to the move from a fringe activity to a mainstream concept.

Expecting mindfulness to treat an underlying medical condition is akin to the idea of advance yogis being able to circumvent the laws of physics and levitating or surviving on only sunshine for years at a time. I have never met such an advanced practitioner so for the time being I will retain a degree of skepticism, but even then no one would claim such advance states could be achieved in one off courses over a few weeks.

I do use mindfulness techniques or perhaps rather a distortion of mindfulness to endure when in pain so severe that my only option is to lying fully horizontal and totally immobile for hours or even days. For me does not reduce fatigue or pain, but may help endure it. Being able to develop a state of equanimity and self awareness perhaps also can help with pacing and cutting out what is not essential or planing activity more efficiently, however equanimity and wider self awareness is not a necessary consequence of mindfulness alone.

I worry that use of mindfulness, especially arising out of limited experimental designs relying on short term courses and self reported measures, will not actually be helpful and for some a waste of limited energy or even potentially harmful.

Some may find it relaxing or helpful in developing self awareness, but any one wanting to pursue it seriously would be much better seeking out an experienced teacher rather than a health or education professional dabbling in mindfulness as a sideline.