Cold Sores

Cold sores, herpes, shingles and Epstein-Barr (otherwise known as glandular fever) are all known as ‘latent viruses.’

That means that once the virus has made itself at home in some of your cells, it goes into hibernation and remains dormant until later when something triggers it back into action.

This flurry of activity gets the immune system firing on all cylinders ready to contain and neutralise the problem. But before the cavalry arrives, the expanded virus goes latent again in a new round of cells. It’s a biological cat and mouse chase!

To give themselves the best chance of a successful strike, the viruses wait until your immune system is weak before going into replication overdrive.

That’s why these types of viruses tend to flare up during periods of physical or psychological stress.

These latent viruses have a stretch of DNA that can detect when there are elevated levels of stress steroid hormones (glucocorticoids) in the system which are a good marker for impaired immune functioning.

When those steroid hormones are abundant, the virus reactivates and, hey presto, we get a nasty little surprise. 

Beeja meditation helps by giving us the deep rest we need to counteract physical stress and limit the chances of an outbreak in the first place.

The level of neurological balance that Beeja meditation brings makes us much more resistant to psychological stress. By going anywhere between two and five times deeper than the deepest point in sleep during our meditation, we can give ourselves the support we need to offset the constant demands on our lives.

And it’s not just when we close our eyes to meditate that we get the benefit. For the rest of the day, our body is much closer to its natural sense of equilibrium and the likelihood of repeated outbreaks reduces.

It is not bulletproof, of course. If you continue to get the occasional outbreak even with a daily meditation practice, then there may be a lifestyle issue at play too. 

But a simple daily meditation practice will greatly reduce the probability of outbreak and will also strengthen your immune system so that it’s able to combat an attack more quickly than over the counter treatments.