A long story from Aislie Mears to conclude. Aplogoies for the lenght of this item, but its such a good yarn it cannot be tampered with.
Ainslie Mears famously pioneered meditation as a medical technique in Melbourne with patients like Ian Gawler as his students.
However Aisles' journey was not a simple one , exploring eastern mysticism in the 1950's and bringing it into mainstream medicine was way ahead of its time.
This preface from his book "relief without drugs" is written in 1967 and it is included to allow you to visualize the journey from then to now and how far we have come in our acceptance and knowledge of such beneficial techniques.

INTRODUCTION
As you pick up this book you immediately ask yourself, "Is the man who writes this free of all tension and pain himself?"
No. I admit it quite openly. I am not completely free of tension and pain. But on the other hand, the general level of my tension is so much less, and my tolerance of pain so increased since commencing this study, that I feel an urgent need to communicate this experience, so that you too may share in this greater ease of body and mind.

My most difficult task is bringing you to understand that the relief of tension and pain can be a relatively simple procedure which anyone can learn if he goes about it in the right way, There is no doubt about this. The evidence for it is my personal experience in experiments I have carried out on myself and the testimony of hundreds of patients whom I have taught the procedures that I am about to describe. I state this quite categorically, as the main obstacle in the relief of tension and pain is the sufferer's belief that he can do nothing about it, save take increasing doses of sedatives, tranquillizers, and pain-killing drugs.

The first hurdle, then, is the feeling that nothing can be done, we tend to believe a person more readily when we know something about him. So I feel I must tell you something of myself and the experience on which this work is based. It will then be easier for you to believe me when I tell you that we can learn to modify our experience of nervous tension and pain by the act of our minds; and that this is a relatively simple process which can be mastered by almost anyone who is prepared to devote a little time and patience to the matter.

I am a psychiatrist, and over the years I have used all the orthodox forms of treatment to help my patients. I have found hypnosis much more effective than the usual forms of psychotherapy which aim to bring to light childhood conflicts and relate them to present problems. My experience has been that the patient often still retained his symptoms even when the childhood conflicts have been brought to the surface and he appeared to have full understanding of the cause of his condition. My results with hypnosis have been much more satisfactory. My work in this field led me into contact with others in different countries, and a few years ago I was honoured to become President of the International Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis.

By the use of hypnosis I was able to relieve many patients of pain which was of psychological origin; however, I soon found myself helping a number of patients whose pain was not due to psychological causes but rather to organic disease, At this stage the thought came to me that many Eastern mystic, particularly the yogis of India, are credited with having such control over their bodies that they are practically immune to pain. So I set off in search of yogis in the hope that I could find something in their methods that could be used in the consulting-room psychiatry of the Western world.

I visited Burma, India, and Kashmir, conferring with various yogis and wise men without any very startling results, I then went to Nepal, and in the foothills of the Himalayas near Katmandu I had the great good fortune to find a wise man, half saint, half yogi, who was locally known as the Siva-Puri Baba, This man, who was reputed to be 134 years old, had about him such an air of serenity that one was immediately aware of his presence. He could speak perfect English, and each morning I sat with him in the forest and we talked together on the subject of my search, In response to my questioning he told me that he never experienced the sensation of tension or anxiety.

I then asked him, "Do you feel pain?" "Yes, I feel pain." Then after a pause, he added, "But there is no hurt in it," When I questioned him further, he went on to explain that if he trod on a tack he would be aware of it, but it would not hurt him, there would be no pain in the ordinary sense.

He had achieved this state of mind through many years of meditation and ascetic practices, so I kept bringing our conversation back to the nature of meditation, which seemed to me central to the problem. One day when I had been pursuing the subject rather relentlessly, he told me, "You can show a child a banana, but you cannot tell him how it tastes." But I believe I learned enough to understand that autohypnosis plays a very important part in the meditative process as with his analogy about the banana, the way to understand the relaxing mental exercises which I shall describe to you is by actually practicing them.

A year or so later I visited the Indonesian island of Bali, and was able to examine a fire dancer as he danced in a deep trance amid a mass of red-hot burning coconut husks. Immediately after he stopped dancing I examined his legs and spoke to him through an interpreter. To my surprise I learned that he had had no long period of training for such a feat, but had merely been selected for the task by the members of his village and had been given protection by the priest in a simple ritualistic ceremony which I had witnessed just prior to his plunging into the fire, The old man of Katmandu had spent more than a hundred years of arduous religious practice to gain his present state of mind, but this man had achieved an extraordinary defense against pain in a matter of a few moments. It occurred to me that this kind of immunity may not be so difficult to attain as one is accustomed to believe.

I began to experiment on myself. I tried sitting or lying on a stone wall in my garden for half an hour at a time on weekends. Instead of keeping my mind on the nature of Brahma as did the old man of Katmandu, I merely concentrated on the sensations of calm and ease. While doing this I would become relatively immune to the minor discomfort of lying or sitting on the hard stone surface; and I soon noticed that the feeling of calm and ease which I had consciously induced began to stay with me during the rest of the day. I found that while in this relaxed state I could become quite oblivious to such things as pebbles under my back, and I could pierce my skin with a needle without discomfort.

Then the big chance came. I had to have a decayed tooth extracted. My usual dentist referred me to a dental surgeon but instead I approached a dentist friend and asked him if he would co-operate with me in an experiment and take out my tooth without any anesthetic. With some insistence on my part he finally agreed, but said he must first take an X ray. The next day he phoned me saying that the X ray showed it would be a difficult extraction and that he was not prepared to proceed with the experiment. After further discussion though, he agreed to try it. I relaxed in the dental chair, and the tooth was extracted without discomfort. I was surprised at the ease and effectiveness of the way in which pain was inhibited; and the dentist himself was truly amazed. He' told me that he had had to cut the gum and peel it off the bone, then chisel away the bone to the level of the end of the root, and then extract the tooth obliquely. The dentist was so impressed that he reported our little experiment in the Medical Journal of Australia. * McCay, A. R., D.D.S., "Dental Extraction Under Self Hypnosis," Medical Journal of Australia, June 1, 1963.

Since then I have had another tooth extracted under similar circumstances except that I had a medical colleague with me to act as observer and record my pulse rate and blood pressure at the time of the extraction. More recently I had a sebaceous cyst removed from the back of my neck, without anesthetic and without discomfort. An interesting side line of this last experiment was that a week later, when about to have the stitches removed, I did not think to relax and experienced quite sharp pain when the adhesive dressing was removed from the wound. Of course it is common practice for psychiatrists to relieve patients of pain which is of psychological origin. But now with the certainty of this knowledge derived from my own experience that organically determined pain can be influence by act of will I proceeded to help patients whose pain was clearly organic and not psychological in origin. A number of such patients whose pain had not been relieved by large doses of analgesics have been taught in this way to control their pain. I am convinced by these successes that the ability to inhibit pain is not just some peculiar aspect of my own personality, as some of my colleagues have suggested; but it is in fact an ability latent in us all, which can be quite readily evoked with a little practice and a little patience.

This then is the background upon which this work is based: a wide experience of orthodox psychiatry and hypnosis, and first hand contact with Eastern mystics. Then came a period of personal experimentation, followed by the relief of patients by personal instruction in the consulting room; and now this is the final step-the assistance of others in their homes through communication by the written word (Meares 1967)

So that finishes this brief encounter with the concept of meditation, now its up to you to experiment and try it for yourself !