The Many Benefits of Meditation and Why You Should Meditate…
Meditation used to be a practice exclusively to monks and hermits who want experience enlightenment in this lifetime. That was thousands of years ago. Meditation right now is a practice that’s becoming mainstream. There’s a reason for this: Health experts are trumpeting meditation as a way to promote your health and overall well being.
As far as emotional well-being is concerned, meditation clears you mind, enabling you to manage your stress, become more detached from stressful situations, and reduce overall emotional negativity. On the physical level, meditation can help to heal diseases that can worsen with stress and negativity, like cancer, high blood pressure, and heart diseases.
What happens during meditation? Research has shown that when you mediate, your body naturally becomes relaxed, moving closer to a deep sleep while being awake. This triggers a whole set of reactions in the body: your heartbeat slows, your blood pressure decreases, your breath slows and your muscles relax. Within three minutes of meditation, your oxygen consumption decreases by 10 to 17 percent. This is very important: the less oxygen your body consumes, the less stressed you become.
Different Types of Meditation
True meditation actually involves withdrawing the physical senses, concentrating your mind to one point and then repeating a mantra several times. A mantra is just a two-syllable word that has a profound meaning. There are meditation groups out there that give their initiates mantras that mean °∞God°± in Sanskrit. The idea is to align the human mind to the mind of a higher, divine power. However, people who are new to meditation rarely, if ever, are able to control their minds up to that point.
Thankfully, there are easy forms of meditation practices that you can try that will give you the same health benefits of true meditation.
• Guided – With guided meditation, a voice will guide you through the entire process of totally relaxing your body to meditate. There are many guided meditation CDs out there that you can listen to. The ones we recommend are audios that are done by people who meditate themselves because their voices do have a certain vibration.
• Sound – Binary audios can automatically put you in a meditative state that blocks out all thoughts from coming to the surface. Sound meditation is best for people who can’t concentrate and need to have some external tool to control their minds.
• Silent – Silent meditation techniques like Vipassana require you to be silent for a few days (or a few weeks) and to refrain from using your phone, watching TV, surfing the Internet, listening to music and talking to anyone. Although the results of this type of meditation practice can be miraculous, it is not for everyone. People who are undergoing psychiatric treatment should NOT do it.
• Breath – This is probably the easiest form of mediation and only involves you concentrating on your breath and making the effort to slow your breathing – making it go down all the way to your diaphragm. People who have shallow breathing actually have high levels of stress and have poor concentration.
• Walking – Zen monks practice walking meditation. With this type of meditation practice, you walk around slowly with your eyes closed. This practice really does heighten your inner awareness because you have nothing in front of you. It also gives you the opportunity to confront your fear and anxiety.
• Mindfulness- With mindfulness meditation, you simply watch your mind as it works and thinks different thoughts. People usually get too emotionally involved when they think: If they remember something from the past or think about their future, it makes them either sad or happy. With mindfulness meditation, you simply let your mind be.
• Transcendental meditation (TM). The transcendental meditation technique is one form of true meditation that involves internally repeating a mantra for 15 to 20 minutes everyday. Among all the meditation techniques, TM is said to be the most widely-practiced worldwide, although there is no way of knowing just how many people practice it.
If you want to try meditation, you can start with any of the techniques we discussed above. Daily Meditations are a wonderful way to begin or end your day or even, once in the morning and once in the evening, to get the most benefit from meditation.
Meditation Techniques for Beginners
If you are just starting out on your path, there are many beautiful books to read and also visit the Internet for meditation techniques for beginners. I have found there are plenty of free meditations to download if you don’t want to go to the expense of buying a CD!
May peace be with you,
