Meditation Research
Meares came to use meditation as a means of treatment of psychosomatic and psychoneurotic illnesses in the late 1960s.
Developing on his expertise in medical hypnotism, Meares came to develop an interest in meditation as a treatment for the psychological component of their chronic organic pain. He began research on the biological mechanisms of pain. He visited India and Nepal in order to document the ways Eastern mystics or yogis influenced their perceptions through spiritual practices, particularly meditation.
In Kathmandu, Nepal he met Shiva Puri Baba, who claimed to be 134 years old. This man taught Meares a simple (i.e., non-complex) meditation technique that he applied in his approach to the treatment of pain, including that of cancer patients.
In 1976, Meares reported in the Medical Journal of Australia (see "Regression of Cancer After Intensive Meditation") that he had been able to achieve the regression of a number of cancers through his approach to intensive meditation. It is highly significant that his system of meditation did not involve any sort of mental imagery (or "visualisation") such as that promoted by other sorts of mind-based interventions — and, specifically, he identified the interventions that were promoted in Getting Well Again (1978) by Simonton, Simonton and Creighton.
In 1978, he reported a case in which his patient, having gone into full remission from his methods, had unilaterally decided — whilst he was absent in Nepal and, without any consultation with him and entirely without his approval — to use Simonton-type "mental imagery" as an adjunct to the methods she had been taught by Meares. Her cancer re-emerged; and, by the time that Meares had returned to Australia, she was once again in a life-threatening situation. A very angry Meares, demanded that she revert to his procedures and his procedures alone. Soon her cancers were, once again, in full remission.
Meares, an extremely shy man who was reluctant to lecture in public, went on to write a number of popular books, including his best-seller Relief without Drugs.
Read more about this topic: Ainslie Meares
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