Meditation, Mindfulness, and Prayer: Three Spiritual Modalities Utilized for Healing

This paper describes three spiritual practices utilized for healing. These modalities—meditation, mindfulness, and prayer—share a spiritual foundation and appear to operate, in part, through mind–body connections that can be accessed to ameliorate physical and psychological symptoms and to promote health. For each modality, this paper discusses pertinent conceptual issues, summarizes empirical evidence suggestive of a role in healing, and outlines theoretical support for such a relationship. Also discussed is a fourth modality, energy healing, and how it might be studied, as well as why further investigation of spiritual healing is merited and a worthwhile topic for medical research.