Religion has long understood that a healthy soul must cohabit with a healthy body. Hence certain rites which are akin to preventive medicine. Today, the interest of some Ave Maria for the state of the heart.
Most adults remember the endless hours spent in church with the family. It is not easy to measure the effects on the size of the soul, as the various facts of modern life demonstrate it every day; on the other hand, medicine can come to the aid of churches, which are increasingly deserted. Not necessarily by completing them, but first by justifying them. Not the Catholic religion only, but most of them.
Way of life
We know the positive influence of religions on eating habits: for example the consumption of fish on Fridays among Catholics, or the ban on eating pork among Muslims, which in the past almost systematically carried a parasitic disease. It is also known that circumcision which consists in removing the foreskin is a factor of hygiene. Meditation is a great stress reliever tool.
Against heart attacks
Italian doctors brought another piece to the record of saving faith. Their conclusion: praying regularly with the help of a rosary is perhaps a good way to guard against myocardial infarction and stroke. To achieve this, they studied the effect of 2 stanzas of the Ave Maria in Latin, recited at a normal pace, that is to say in about 10 seconds.
We know that in order to keep our heart rate and blood pressure at normal levels, there is a control center in our carotids. It is as if, on a regular basis, a machine took our pulse and blood pressure to be able to react in the event of abnormal values. This internal clock acts six times a minute… That is to say at the same rate as the recitation of Ave Maria. However, in the heart, these control reflexes tend to weaken, we can imagine that anything that can lead to their stimulation is welcomed positively. This is the case for breathing at this rate of 6 inspirations – expirations per minute. Which is slower than normal.
But from hypothesis to practice, there is always a step that Italian researchers have not taken. Let us also add that slow and deep breathing promotes well-being and we can perhaps deduce that this practice will be positive for heart patients. You may object to me that we can try to do it without the help of an Ave Maria. Certainly, but doing it in a conscious and very repetitive way is not easy. Hence the usefulness of the repetitiveness of this Catholic prayer… Which comes to us from the Tibetan and Indian monks; it is indeed the Crusaders who, returning from the Orient, imported this custom… modernized at that time thanks to the rosary!
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