Medical Meditation by Richard Nongard, Ph.D.

Title: Medical Meditation
Author: Richard Nongard, PhD
Format: Book
Source: www.subliminalscience.com
Price: $14.95
Rating: Excellent

[Full Disclosure: Richard Nongard is a friend of mine who has provided a great deal of advice and encouragement. He gave me a complimentary copy of Medical Meditation to review, fully aware that I might give it a bad review despite our friendship. So what follows is my unbiased opinion.]

Regular readers of my hypnosis reviews blog might wonder why I'm reviewing a book about meditation. Well, the reason is simple. As the author explains on page 3, meditation and self-hypnosis are sister arts; indeed, for his purposes, the terms are interchangeable. Kudos for calling a spade a spade.

At first glance, Medical Meditation might seem like a slim offering in the world of mind-body medicine. How much can an author teach in just 74 pages?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Dr. Nongard has a talent for stripping a topic down to its barest essentials and then teaching it in simple baby steps, and that's exactly what he does in this volume that is conveniently light enough for even the weakest of invalids to hold.

Though the book lists a number of applications for medical meditation, the text mostly focusses on chronic pain, cancer recovery, and meditation for pre- and post-surgery. This makes sense, as these are the areas with which the author or close associates have first-hand knowledge. Though the work is aimed primarily at patients with no prior knowledge of mind-body medicine, it's a good read for hypnotists; I can envision building an entire series of workshops around these methods for my local cancer center.

The book carefully guides non-meditators through the steps of deep breathing, mindfulness, progressive muscle relaxation, visualization, and autogenic training, first with simple, brief exercises, and later with expansions on each. Along with a brief chapter on lifestyle changes for the chronically ill, these simple but powerful techniques make up the core of the book.

The instructions for basic autogenic training are especially exciting, as information on that topic is surprisingly rare. The author has also created a five-week autogenic course that is available on DVD; perhaps I will review that at some point.

Best of all, Dr. Nongard explains and teaches meditation in a way that is free from all metaphysical trappings—other than a brief statement that positive belief really does foster positive outcomes in ways that defy explanation—thus making meditation accessible to anyone who needs it, despite religious background. For those who fear that meditation is about chanting with gurus, living in communes, eating vegetarian, and seeking enlightenment, this book is a welcome breath of fresh air. A deep abdominal breath, at that.

Can I complain about the book? Not much. I do have a pet peeve for typos, and the text is mostly free of them. There is, however, one typo of a sort I see over and over in the writing of hypnotists. How many times have I seen the words "breath" and "breathe" mixed up? Usually it's "breath deeply." That error sets my teeth on edge.

Well, the good news is that the typo only appears once in Medical Meditation. The bad news is that it appears in a very prominent, all-bold section title. Ouch.

Otherwise, though, I really can't complain about Medical Meditation. It's a practical guide, light enough in the hand that even the bedridden can use it, and light enough on the wallet that anyone can afford to give it as a gift. I wouldn't be surprised if some doctors kept a stack to hand out one to every patient. There are even some affordable recordings available to support the exercises in the book.

All in all, a deceptively simple text—like the practice of "doing nothing" for a while each day, it has a value far beyond what is apparent at first glance. I'm tempted to give it to a friendly doctor, but I think I'll be keeping it for myself.