Why is meditation so powerful

 Why is meditation so powerful?

We hear the advice to meditate all the time. We are told (or perhaps have experienced) that meditating helps us relax, improves our focus, deepens our sleep, increases our productivity, reduces our stress, and even boosts our immune systems. It seems like a fix-it-all, miracle cure. How can something so simple do all of this at once?

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Meditation for Stress Reduction

Living with a lot of stress can be harmful to our bodies. To deal with stress, take time out of each day (even if it’s just for 10 minutes) to meditate. Meditation allows the mind, body, and spirit to break away for a bit from everything that’s going on mentally, emotionally, and physically, and it also helps the body to relax.

When meditating, the body produces less of the stress-related hormone called cortisol, and more of the feel-good chemical serotonin. Because of this, entire moods can be enhanced through meditation.

Meditation for Better Health

Meditation has the power to improve digestion, to strengthen the immune system, maintain normal cholesterol and blood pressure levels. People with chronic issues often turn to meditation for some type of alleviation.

Meditation has helped reduce the recovery process in those with excessive stress in their life. Calming the mind, body, and spirit through meditation can help the body to rest more deeply so that it can focus on health and healing.

Meditation to Improve Sleep

For those who may have trouble falling asleep, or staying asleep, consider meditation before bedtime. Meditation can help clear the mind of everything that has gone on during the day, and it can instead help the brain focus on the peace one feels from simply being alive.

To practice meditation before bedtime, set aside about 10 minutes to first calm the body and then to relax the mind. Try to release any worries you may be holding on to from your long day of work. Rest the muscles, joints, and emotional body. Then, imagine that all those troubles are gone, so that your body can once and for all concentrate on sleep.

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Meditation: A Very Powerful Tool of Healing

The power of meditation goes well beyond these three basic benefits. It includes the ability to assist with positive thinking and emotional stability, and to bring about a general sense of happiness in one’s life. If you don’t already include meditation practice in your day, or at least once during your week, consider putting a practice into place today.

The reason meditation is so powerful is that it causes shifts in our awareness. Many people over-identify with their thoughts and emotions, which can prolong them and make them feel bigger than they are. Specific thoughts or feelings can agonize us for days on end. Such pervasive thoughts and intense emotions can culminate in all types of problems, including stress, anxiety, and depression. It is important to recognize that we are not our thoughts and feelings. Habitual meditation helps us realize that we are just the vessels through which they flow. We are the consciousness that experiences them, but we do not have to attach ourselves to them. We begin to feel bigger than our thoughts and emotions, and we are able to take back the control. We gain the capacity to zoom out and find inner-peace during times of difficulty.

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If this convinced you to give meditation a try, do this simple exercise today. Find a comfortable position, perhaps lying on your back. Set an alarm for five minutes. Close your eyes and imagine a river running through your mind. Hear the sounds the running water makes. Feel the current sweeping through your brain. There are leaves floating down the river. Each time you have a thought, place it on one of the leaves. Let the thought go as the leaf flows away. At the end of the five minutes, slowly open your eyes. Notice how easy or difficult it was for you to let go of your thoughts as they arose. If you repeat this meditation daily, you’ll notice how much easier it becomes, both during the meditation and in daily life.

 

The Dark Side of Meditation No One Seems to Be Talking About

A Brief Recounting on the Origins of Meditation

Meditation is a set of techniques designed to promote heightened awareness and focused attention. It is about reconnecting with all five senses of our body and the immediate experiences of life. Meditation is a consciousness-altering technique that has been shown to have numerous psychological benefits.

The word ‘meditation’ comes from the Latin root ‘meditatum,’ which means ‘to ponder.’ Meditation in the classical tradition has an acceptable application, which is the transformation of the person to realize oneself in a state of total transcendence and freedom from all the existential constraints.

Meditation is a technique for resting the mind leading to peace, happiness, bliss, and self-realization. Meditation techniques are found in most, if not all, of the world’s major religious traditions.

The Buddhist monks used to meditate to achieve physical, emotional, and mental peace but now it has become a part of mainstream society. As people tend to work in more stressful and anxious environments, meditation exercises have come to their rescue. But does meditation always help? The answer is no!

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The Less Positive Side of Meditation

The beneficial aspect of meditation can be seen via brain scans that show the enhancement in the insular cortex, a region that involves controlling emotions and perceptions. Hence, techniques like mindful breathing can help us become more in tune with our own feelings, which ultimately aids our ability to make good decisions. Other techniques, such as self-awareness through observation, helps us to pay keen attention to our own thoughts, without being judgmental in various worldly scenarios. Over a period of time, activities like these can increase one’s emotional capacity and help in overcoming extreme emotional reactions.

Ideally, these activities should help a person’s well-being but it can happen only if they occur in well-balanced and harmonious proportions. If one surpasses the optimal level, then these techniques can lead to harmful consequences.

Life Hangs in the Balance

If you have been meditating every day, you would be aware of how sometimes you feel exhausted. That feeling, in turn, can be terrifying. I used to meditate, and it did help me cope with the various types of stress that you face on a daily basis.

But, I also felt as if I was drifting away from the good parts of my life. Things that used to entice me were now lifeless. It’s similar to how you feel standing inside a warm room with a fireplace and watching the snow fall through a windowpane. You are at ease, but there is no excitement. You’re warm, but you’re missing out on the excitement of playing in the snow.

There is a lot of content that sells mindfulness as a magic pill—the miracle cure that will change your life—and it could change your life for the better or for the worse. You might learn how to make decisions without allowing emotions to cloud your judgment.

But do you want to live a life where you don’t feel anything? A life in which, instead of separating the wheat from the chaff, you separate the wheat with the chaff and discard what makes you human, your emotions?

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No Gain Without Pain

Like any journey or venture, there are ups and downs, and so is the case with leading a mindful life. In the journey of being relieved and leading a stress-free life, people tend to meditate, exercise, and practice mindful activities that spike one’s anxiety and apprehension. “It’s natural for meditation, to arouse anxiety in some people, and this can be a valuable part of a healing process,” says Tara Brach, a clinical psychologist and author of Radical Acceptance. Or, we can simply put it as transformation can be painful, getting out of your comfort zone and doing something that creates radical changes in your soul can be hard to deal with, especially for people that are mentally challenged.

Famous Persons Who Were Affected by the Dark Side

A number of Western Buddhists are aware that meditation is not without difficulties; they have even named the emotional difficulties that arise from their meditative practice the “dark night.”

The dark side of meditation has not only affected ordinary people—even some of the more well-known personalities have been touched by the psycho-spiritual depression.

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7 Reasons Meditation Isn’t Helping

According to research, the following are some of the reasons meditation can affect you negatively:

• Overdoing meditation
• Choosing unguided meditation technique
• Loss of interest in meditation
• Unable to recover from a traumatic experience
• When there is too much negativity around
• Relationship issues within family or spouse
• Improper sleep patterns

Stop Hyping Meditation As a Cure-All

Meditation is a great technique for attention enhancement and to create a locus of control. It can help one to be calmer and more focused in life.

Meditation, from Buddhist monks to becoming part of the mainstream culture, has come a long way that now celebrities such as Oprah and Deepak Chopra offer a 21-day class with an ad that promotes meditation as the cure to all problems from sleep deprivation to heart diseases.

The significant thing people need to comprehend is that meditation-related anxiety is real and it can have detrimental consequences.

As one size doesn’t fit all, similarly there is no one magic formula, trick, or technique of meditation that can lead to a healthy life. Hands-on experience says that different people require different methods of contemplative practice.

“Just like finding the right exercise for someone who is physically challenged, it’s possible to find a style of meditation practice that serves someone with symptoms of trauma,” says Dr. Tara Brach, an American psychologist.

“We’ve had an overwhelming number of people contacting the lab and saying, “I can’t feel anything, I don’t feel any love for my family. What do I do?”

Dr. Britton says that many people experience a sense of numbness, that is they can no longer feel extreme joy and have encapsulated dissociation from life.

These experiences explain why we should abstain from selling meditation as a cure for all, or as an anxiety-reliever.

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When Meditation Becomes Distressing

When darkness falls Britton set out to investigate meditation-related experiences, specifically those that were described as challenging, difficult, distressing, functionally impairing, or requiring additional support. Her study, published in the Public Library of Science One journal last spring, looked at nearly 100 interviews with meditation teachers, experts, and practitioners of Western Buddhist practices—including Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan traditions—many of whom reported challenging meditation experiences.

The majority (88 percent) of the meditators in the study reported that these experiences had an impact on their lives beyond their meditation sessions. A whopping 73 percent indicated moderate to severe impairment (meditating prompted a reaction or result that kept them from living their normal, daily lives), 17 percent reported feeling suicidal, and another 17 percent required inpatient hospitalization for psychosis.