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Beat Stress With Meditation: The benefits of meditation

by Naomi Ozaniec

Meditation is good for you – that’s official. The western approach is always that of empirical research, but now a considerable body of evidence proves that meditation really is good for mind, body, and spirit.

Meditation is holistic; it brings benefit to all areas of life by creating a deeper sense of connection with the world, a sense of purpose, happiness, contentment, greater physical vitality, self-control and enhanced confidence. Regular meditation creates positive mental states which in turn have positive physiological effects on blood flow, oxygen consumption, respiratory rate, heart rate, blood pressure and carbon dioxide elimination in the muscles. Specific mental imagery and conscious breathing brings a multidimensional and interactive physical effect, stressful situations, post-operative recovery, self-healing and health generally will benefit from regular meditation. The chemical, electrical and neural effects in the brain created by regular periods of calming and positive mental activity brings a wide range of benefits including an enhancement of athletic or sporting performance skills, a lowering of stress-related chemistry and general improvements in psychological health.

Western scientific method recently has shown that the practice of meditation improves cognitive task performance, increases mental concentration, reduces susceptibility to stress and anxiety, enhances motor skills, increases exercise tolerance, sharpens perceptions, improves concentration, maintains health, provides a general positive outlook on life, and fosters the development of personal meaning. The East has known this for much longer.




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Beat Stress With Meditation: Yoga The word Yoga is derived from the Sanksrit, yuj, meaning ‘to unite, integrate or join.’ Yoga therefore connects and unifies moral, mental, physical and spiritual well-being, and the various branches of Yoga achieve this in differing ways. Western Yoga is mainly Hatha Yoga. Taking its name from the two Sanskrit words for sun and moon, Ha-tha Yoga unifies and harmonizes the whole person by working directly on the body using a series of postures called asanas. Hatha Yoga impacts deeply into the nerves, glands and vital organs; its purifying action improves mental skills, lifts awareness and awakens spiritual sensitivity.
Beat Stress With Meditation: Practice Meditation is a practical personal activity; it cannot be learned by reading a book even though informed reading can be of great value. Meditation must be experienced through personal practice, the daily and repeated exercise of entering into a particular meditative awareness. Sustained practice alone brings the many benefits that meditation brings.
Beat Stress With Meditation: Buddhism Buddhism was founded on the experience of Siddhartha Gautama. Born a prince, he was determined to leave the confines of the palace where he saw death, sickness and old age for the first time. After eventually leaving, he travelled for many years seeking spiritual truth. Finally after six years, he settled into meditation beneath the shade of a tree where he attained enlightenment, a profound state of directly seeing into the nature of reality and in doing so became the Buddha, ‘One who is Awake.’ Buddhism was founded.
Beat Stress With Meditation: Retreats Contemporary life is stressful: timetables and deadlines, continuous pressures, noise and the demands of home and work inevitably take a toll on mind, body and spirit; the retreat could be the necessary antidote.
Beat Stress With Meditation: Vipassana Vipassana means to see things as they really are. Vipassana meditation develops a knowing about the world based on direct perception, rather than the more usual reliance upon intellectual concepts of the world. In Tibetan, the term is translated to mean ‘superior seeing’, ‘great vision’ or ‘supreme wisdom’. In English the term is less effectively translated as ‘insight meditation’.
Beat Stress With Meditation: Guided meditation Meditation is most often a silent, internal experience. However a guided meditation is led and directed by a second person, usually a class teacher who describes a particular inner landscape in considerable detail. This type of meditation is now widely packaged in CD or audio form for a western audience; the voice provides a narrated description, the listener creates matching visual images. Although visualized meditations have a long and respectable history in both eastern and western traditions, this does not mean that visualization of itself has meaning and transformative potential.
Beat Stress With Meditation: Meditation Meditation may have developed when early humans stared for long periods of time into the flickering flames of their fires, in a dark cave, and fell into a state of relaxation. Although meditation often has spiritual or religious associations, this is not essential.
Beat Stress With Meditation: Massage From a full body massage lasting an hour, to a quick back rub given by a friend or partner, a massage is a great way to relax. Massage can loosen your muscles and ease tension.
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Beat Stress With Meditation: Classes Meditation classes are widespread and popular. Classes are now spreading into the workplace and, in some instances, into schools. Details about local classes can be found through the library or through community information and the Internet will provide plenty of information about different courses. Joining a class offers many advantages: proper instruction, peer support and friendship, the chance to ask questions or raise difficulties and the opportunity for regular practice among like-minded people.
Beat Stress With Meditation: Positions Meditation is undeniably associated with particular body positions, most especially the sitting cross-legged positions known as the full or half lotus. This idea is quite daunting to most westerners who will find such positions impossible.
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