In 2010, the year I was diagnosed with lung cancer, a dear friend gave me a book called Anticancer, A New Way of Life. At the time, I glanced through the book, assumed it was all about changing one's diet, but never actually read the book, which is heavy on technical data and research. Actually, the book has been on my shelf untouched all these years.
Yesterday, as I was sorting through books to give away, I casually flipped through its pages once again, trying to decide if this was something I would ever read or not. I had almost decided to discard the book when a sub-title on page 159 caught my attention: The Mantra and the Rosary.
The lead-in sentence to this section of the book was this: There is a perfectly objective way to measure the relationship between exercises such as yoga and meditation and what is happening in the body. Then the author describes the research of Dr. Luciano Bernardi of the University of Pavia in Italy, who had been looking at variations in heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and the way these rhythms fluctuate at different times of the day. He knew that a balance between these various biorhythms is the most accurate indicator of good health; in some studies, measures of this balance can accurately predict survival forty years down the line.
Dr. Bernardi was looking at the conditions that lead to a temporary disorganization of these rhythms and the way the body recovers its equilibrium. In other words, the slightest stress affects all of our biorhythms, and our bodies need some way to recover. [I myself had just experienced the effects he was describing. I had just told my husband how upset/ angry/ frustrated it always makes me to spend an hour or more on the phone with a friend who just loves to talk. As an extrovert, it doesn't matter to her what we talk about; the more trivial, the better, it seems: the flow of words is the important thing. I don't mind letting her talk, but as an introvert, mindless chatter seems to affect all of my biorhythms with discord. I need recovery time when I get off the phone. Fortunately, I have discovered that a Sudoku puzzle seems to help me forget and de-program the effect of aimless and empty conversation. By the way, an hour or more of meaningful conversation has the opposite effect of energizing and revitalizing me.]
Anyway, back on topic: In order to measure the physiological changes in his experiments, Dr. Bernardi needed a "control" experiment, a so-called neutral condition in which the subjects talked aloud without mental effort or stress. As the subjects lived in Italy, a deeply Catholic country he naturally thought of having them recite the rosary. When his subjects started reciting a stream of Ave Marias in Latin, the laboratory instruments recorded a totally unexpected phenomenon: all the different biological rhythms being measured started to resonate. They all lined up, one after the other, mutually amplifying one another to create a smooth, harmonious pattern. What Dr. Bernardi discovered was that during the rosary, the body mechanically and subconsciously adjusts breathing to a frequency of six breaths a minute, which happens to be the natural rhythm of fluctuations in the other biological functions: heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow to the brain. The result of this synchronization is that the rhythm of each function resonates with the others, mutually reinforcing one another, just as when one is on a swing and the forward thrust of the legs, timed precisely with the upswing, amplifies the movement.
In 2006, two researchers at Ohio State University published a review of all the studies concerning the variations of biological rhythms. They concluded that everything that amplifies variations, as in Bernardi's study, is associated with a number of health benefits, namely, better functioning of the immune system, reduction of inflammation, and better regulation of blood sugar levels. These are, precisely, three of the principal factors that act against the development of cancer.
Of course, Dr. Bernardi's study is the only one that used the Rosary as a control factor; other studies have used mantras and meditation as controls, with much the same results. Here is what I find amazing, however: The Blessed Mother gave the Rosary to St. Dominic in the 12th century to combat the heresy of the Albigensians. What preaching and teaching could not do at the time, the rosary did without effort, almost automatically. But who knew at the time that the rosary would continue its benefits down to the 21st century, not in combatting heresy, but in combatting stress and discord in our bodies? Perhaps this is the reason so many people say the Rosary in order to fall asleep each night.
I'm thinking that maybe I need to replace Sudoku with at least one decade of the Rosary!
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