Meditation is one of the great eastern practices that has started to take hold in western culture. In fact, people all over the world are benefiting from it, both in mind and body. So, why isn’t everyone meditating? It could be that not everyone knows of all the amazing benefits like increased relaxation, and decreased levels of anxiety and depression. This article contains a run down of only some of the many benefits of bankpezeshkan, and a set of instructions for starting your own meditation practice.
This article is split into two main sections. First, we discuss the benefits of meditation. After that, we talk about how you can start your own meditation practice. If you don’t know of the many benefits of meditation, we recommend you read through the next section. It will help to motivate you to stick with your practice. If you already know the benefits of meditation, feel free to skip forward. There have been many studies performed on meditation in the last decade trying to understand its effects, as well as how it manages to help us so much, both in mind and body.
Research into meditation has demonstrated that meditating for a short time increases alpha waves, which makes us feel more relaxed, while simultaneously decreasing our feelings of anxiety and depression. Alpha waves flow through cells in the brain’s cortex, where we process sensory information. These waves help suppress irrelevant or distracting sensory information, allowing us to focus. The more alpha waves we have, the better we focus. In his book, “What Is Meditation?”, Rob Nairn refers to meditation as a state of “bare attention.” He explains, “It is a highly alert and skillful state of mind because it requires one to stay psychologically present and ‘with’ whatever happens in and around one without adding to or subtracting from it in any way.”
Meditation has many health benefits. Interestingly, an increased ability to focus allows those who suffer from chronic pain to ease their pain by choosing not to focus on it. It can also help with various other health problems, including: anxiety, depression, stress, insomnia, HIV/AIDS and cancer. It can also enhance the body’s immune system, making us less likely to get sick.
Studies have also shown that meditation can help to reverse heart disease. In the journal Stroke, 60 african/americans suffering from a hardening of the arteries were asked to meditated for 6-9 months. Those who meditated showed a notable decrease in the thickness of their artery walls. Those who didn’t meditate showed an increase in thickness. The conclusions were quite dramatic. Meditation offers a potential 11% decrease in risk of a having a heart attack, and 8-15% decrease in risk of having a stroke.
Meditation benefits our minds as well. It teaches us to better control our thoughts. This gives us the ability to quiet those nagging negative thoughts we may have from time to time. A 2007 study, titled “Mental Training Affects Distribution of Limited Brain Resources” in PLOS Biology, suggests that frequent meditation leads to longer attention spans.