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Transcendental Meditation

pukeko21

Member
Messages
5
Location
Scotland
Type of diabetes
Type 1
Treatment type
Insulin
H
I am a 44 year old female who has had IDDM since the age of 14. While at university I did a course in Transcendental Meditation. Meditating had a dramatic effect on my diabetes and when I was practising regularly it reduced my insulin requirements by 1/3. Unfortunately measuring the effect was very unpredictable and meant I had quite a few severe lows that other folk had to help me with.
I would like to start mediating regularly again (hormones, thyroid issues are currently affecting my control).
Does anyone else out there practise TM? I would love to hear about your experiences, good or bad.
Thanks
 
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I have started yoga as I was told it would help me by strengthening my core muscles and reduce anxiety.
 
Hi @pukeko21 I haven't tried TM but I have done mindfulness meditation, sessions were 2 hours and I found on a few occasions that I would start to hypo towards the end, so always keep jelly babies in my pocket, I would suggest looking at reducing either reducing your basal or eating some carbs before you practice. I definately found medititation helped hugely in regards to managing my mental attitude better towards my type 1 and definately recommend it, would be interested to hear how you get on
 
Thanks Jj. Your mindful meditation sounds interesting. I have been experimenting with TM over the last few months. It is 20 minutes twice a day (I usually only manage once). And it seems to have a cumulative effect. Nothing happens over the first few weeks of continuous TM but after 3 or 4 weeks all my insulin needs reducing. I do change the doses but the night time dose is hardest to correct. Normally 18 - 24 depending on my results and exercise, I find I have to cut the dose dramatically. This is hard as i don't want to wake up high. Thanks for the info though. Let me know if you hear of anyone using TM. I would love to talk it over.
 
Hi
I don't practice TM (it was popular when I was young in the 60s) but have used mindfulness meditation for decades. It has certainly helped me with stress reduction and managing my binge eating. Mindfulness meditation is old as the hills, and its basically buddhist practice repackaged for the western world - just like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
If you go to www.wisc.edu it will connect you to a whole heap of things. Look for the "online breath counting tool". This is basically mindfulness training, it is free and you can do it whenever you want. Professor Davidson is one of the foremost neuroscientists in the world ( mind plasticity)and has been studying these matters for decades. There is also MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) which has been in use for well over 10 years as therapy and is a well proven approach.
Hope you find it useful and if you want some further information I am happy to respond to a private message or via this forum.
All the best
fene48
T make it a bit easier:
Use the search for "on line breath counting tool" then pick the topic "awareness online:welcome"
 
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Hi @fene48 , Thanks for your reply. I'd be interested to know if you are T1 or T2 and if you take insulin. Does the mindfulness meditation affect your insulin requirements / HbA1c / control? I am really interested in the link between stress hormones and insulin requirements. I believe meditation reduces stress hormones and allows the body to more readily absorb / use the insulin I am taking.
 
I am a T2 so I am not familiar with insulin. The one thing I can state from personal experience( 40 years plus) is that stress is definitely reduced by meditation of various forms. Mindfulness meditation is possibly the best for western people as it is basic, practical and can be done with different complexities of breath control. As I understand it, hormones tend to go crazy with stress so I think it would follow that if you can reduce stress you it would effect hormone levels. It definitely keeps my blood pressure and other things very stable.
I have not done any reading on insulin specifically, but perhaps looking at Richard Davidson and Wisconsin University site may provide you with some leads. The good professor has been working with the Dalai Lama and serious meditators to try to untangle benefits for western consumption. The range of experiments and measurements they have done is quite impressive and may have something that answers some of your questions.
Regards and all the best.
(Oh, now that you have got me interested in this matter, if I do come across something I will let you know).
 
I forgot to mention the one and only Jon Kabat-Zinn at www.mindfulnesslivingprograms.com. Otherwise research on Type 1 and insulin is pretty thin on the ground. Some interesting snippets on www.insulinnation.com and www.medicalxpress.com
 
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