How many of you would like to have less stress in your day? How many of you would like to have more energy through the day? Taking a few minutes each day to meditate can give you both. In fact, a few minutes of meditation scattered throughout the day can have health and wellness impacts that span across all aspects of your life.
Meditation is simply a process that is designed to clear the mind of all the junk that we carry around. There a re many different ways to meditate, but at the heart of each they follow the same strategy, and this process is what makes them work.
By meditating, your body changes. Your metabolic rate slows, resulting in lower blood pressure, lower heart rate, and slower breathing. Overall nervous system activity in your body goes down, and hand-in-hand with that reduction is a decrease in stress and anxiety levels.
Not only does your physical body feel the effects, there are also benefits to your mental and emotional states. The mental effects include increased focus, greater creativity, improved memory, and quicker learning. On the emotional side, there are immediate and prolonged decreases in anxiety and depression and increases in stability, as well as increased levels of happiness, vitality, and energy in your life.
So how do you meditate? There are as many ways as there are teachers. Earlier I mentioned a few common steps, and all meditations are variants of these steps. Basically, meditation is anything that involves a quiet place, a comfortable posture, an object of focus, and a passive and open attitude.
For the posture, you should ideally be upright and focused, relaxed but not slumped or hunched over. Most people sit on the ground, but you can also sit in a chair. Keep your back erect and neck and head tall. The rest of your body should be comfortable.
The object of your focus can be anything. This is probably the single biggest differentiator between all the flavors of meditation offered by different schools, traditions, instructors, and practitioners. One of the most commonly heard of is focusing on your breath. Another is focusing on the body, one part at a time, or a movement of the body. Another is a sound, chanting repeatedly, like the familiar ‘oooohhhhmmmm’ of south Asian monasteries. But it can be anything, really. It isn’t so important what you focus on as that you focus on something. A runner, like me, might focus on a particular joint or muscle, or the way the ground feels under my feet. A boater may focus on the feel of the wind in the sails.
The fourth component, a passive attitude, is the hardest to learn but also the source of the benefits meditation offers. Meditation will be full of random thoughts, distractions, ideas, worries… in short, everything your mind is full of all the time anyway will come up during meditation. In order for the process to be beneficial, you must detach from these thoughts. That doesn’t mean they don’t come up, just that you do not pursue them or drive them. The difference between meditation practice and other times is that if, during meditation, you realize you forgot to put milk on the grocery list, you do not get up and add it… you simply let the thought go and keep meditating.
Learning to have a passive mind takes time. It can take weeks, months, or even years to really master, and a lifetime to perfect. The goal is not perfection, however, it is simply to take advantage of the process to improve your current physical, mental, and emotional states. And even a small amount of meditation accomplishes this. As little as one minute per hour can lead to noticeable changes, and the addition of an hour a few times per week or a half hour daily can quickly lead to improved thinking and a happier demeanor.
If you don’t already meditate, take a class in yoga, zazen, or any of the other types out there. It will be challenging, and you will love the results.
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Healthy thoughts,
Jeff
