Meditation

What Is Meditation?

Meditation is an exercise in anchoring your awareness in the present moment and fully engaging in the here and now. The term meditation can be used to describe a variety of mind and body practices that improve focus, enhance awareness, and facilitate a sense of inner peace, clarity, and presence.

Meditation is a journey inward. It brings the person meditating into a deeper state of being and connecting to self. Through deep presence and inquiry, the meditator observes whatever they are currently experiencing from a place of compassion, nonjudgment, and curiosity.

What Exactly Does Meditation Do?

To understand exactly how meditation works, it helps to have a basic understanding of the function and structure of the brain and nervous system. Your brain has billions of nerve cells called neurons, which send electrical impulses and chemical signals called neurotransmitters to each other. This helps different areas of your brain to communicate with one another.

Meditation strengthens these neural connections and establishes new neural pathways in your brain. These new pathways can take time to build, meaning you need a consistent meditation practice to reap these benefits.

However, changes in the brain can be observed immediately, even during a short meditation practice. Meditation alters brain waves, leading the brain to produce alpha and theta brain waves, which are responsible for alertness and relaxation.

Meditation also helps to decrease overstimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, the part of your nervous system that regulates your stress response, and it helps to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of the nervous system that allows your body to relax and perform life-sustaining processes. It enables you to get out of “fight or flight” mode and into “rest and digest” mode.

How Do You Meditate?

There are many different ways to meditate. Some meditation techniques may have you focus on a particular object, experience, or sensation. For example, you may meditate by focusing on the breath coming in and out of your nostrils. You may also meditate on a point of focus, such as a candle flame or other visual image, sound, mantra, or positive affirmation. Whatever you choose as your focal point remains your anchor throughout the meditation that you keep coming back to any time your awareness wanders away from the present moment.

Types Of Meditation

There are many different types of meditation and ways to meditate.

Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness is a practice of paying attention to whatever is happening in the present moment with an attitude of curiosity and loving-kindness. It can be practiced while doing any task. You immerse yourself fully in the task and remain aware of what is happening within and around you while you are attending to the task.

Guided Meditation

Guided meditation is a type of meditation in which a guide leads you on your meditative journey. The guide may instruct you on breathing techniques, mantras, or visualizations. Guided meditations may be done in person or via video or audio recording.

Metta (Loving-Kindness) Meditation

Metta meditation is a form of compassion meditation with roots in Buddhism. Metta means unconditional love and loving-kindness. When practicing metta meditation, one sends love and compassion to oneself and others through visualization and mantras such as “May all beings be happy and at peace.”

Movement Meditation

Movement meditation is a type of meditation in which you move the body slowly and mindfully, sometimes in synchronization with the breath. Yoga can also be a form of moving meditation.

Mantra Meditation

Mantra meditation involves chanting or repeating syllables, mantras, or phrases out loud or internally.

Breath Manipulation (Breathwork)

Practicing breathwork entails focusing on the breath and breathing in a specific pattern to achieve a specific result.

Body Scan

A meditative body scan includes scanning and observing the sensations in the body throughout the meditation while becoming aware and releasing stored emotions or tension.

Object Concentration

Object concentration includes focusing on a specific object throughout your meditation, such as a candle flame or geometric pattern.

Gratitude Meditation

Gratitude meditation involves bringing awareness to things in your life that you are thankful for and paying attention to the rise of emotion and sensation of gratitude in the body.

Visualization

Visualization uses imagery and imagination to visualize goals or dreams you wish to achieve or conjure up images to help you relax, fall asleep, release stress, etc. For example, some people visualize going to a safe place in their mind’s eye to help relieve anxiety symptoms.

While there is no right or wrong way to meditate, finding a meditation practice that works for you is important. You may have to experiment with a variety of different meditation techniques in order to find the type of meditation that benefits you most.

Benefits Of Meditation

The popularity of meditation has increased dramatically in recent years as people discover its benefits. While meditation is widely known for treating anxiety and stress, it also helps treat depression and offers several other physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual benefits as well, particularly for people who meditate regularly.

Some research-backed physical benefits of meditation include:

• Increased energy
• Decreased stress
• Improved well-being
• Reduction in pain
• Reduced blood pressure and heart rate
• Improved focus and attention
• Reduced cortisol (stress hormone)
• Increased gray matter in the brain
• Reduced cholesterol
• Improved sleep
• Decreased stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system
• Lowered risk of heart attack (for long-term meditators)
• Increased telomere length (better longevity and slower aging process)
• Improved immune function

Meditation offers a variety of holistic health benefits. However, it has become most popular for its mental health benefits.

Mental Health Benefits

Mindfulness has become a buzzword over the past several years. You may have heard a lot about meditation and mental health techniques to calm the nervous system. Meditation has many mental health benefits.It helps induce positive emotions and relieve stress. It enhances mood, decreases loneliness, builds stress resilience, and improves emotional regulation.

Meditation can help relieve symptoms of many mental health conditions, including:

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Post-traumatic stress
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder
• Panic disorder
• Social anxiety

Meditation can help these conditions by reducing stress, which is often an underlying factor, and impacting the release of neurotransmitters in your brain, including dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which help regulate mood, motivation, learning, and cognition.

Why Does Meditation Work?

From the outside, it may not look like a person meditating is doing much of anything, but a great deal is happening inside the brain. Thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and electroencephalography (EEG) scans, scientists can now pinpoint physical changes in brain structure and function that demonstrate the tangible benefits of meditation that practitioners have been experiencing for centuries.

Meditation works because it helps people quiet the mind and calm the body. By focusing on the present moment, meditation alleviates stress and worry surrounding the past and future and allows a person to find happiness, gratitude, and appreciation for the present moment.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has shown many positive changes in brain structure and functioning following consistent meditation practice. One significant brain change is reduced activity in the amygdala, which governs fear, aggression, and the stress response.

Meditation also increases gray matter in the brain, which typically decreases with age. It is thought to increase gray matter due to its repeated activation of certain areas of the brain, such as the frontal and anterior cingulate regions, which increases the efficiency of the brain’s executive attentional network. This area helps to improve attention and focus and may make meditators faster at completing tasks.

PET scans have also shown significant brain changes. One study from the Ancient Science of Life journal found that Tibetan Buddhist meditators had more blood flow in the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for problem-solving and decision-making, than non-meditators. Urine samples also showed higher levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter responsible for mood, prior to meditation than control subjects and even higher levels after meditation.

Is Meditation A Religious Practice?

While meditation has roots in religion and spiritual traditions, it is a mental exercise, not a religious practice. Meditation originated with Buddhism, where they believed that Sukh,meaning happiness, could be attained by immersing oneself fully in the nature of reality in the present moment. This practice can benefit anyone, regardless of religious or spiritual beliefs.

How Do I Start Daily Meditation?

If you have never meditated before, start by choosing which type of meditation you’d like to try. You can research or experiment with the different meditation techniques to discover which practice(s) best suit your needs.

You may have written instructions that you follow or listen along to a guided meditation to help you stay on track.

Choose a quiet and comfortable space to meditate in. You can sit, lie down, or do a walking meditation. You can play soft music in the background, meditate in silence, or meditate outside and listen to the sounds of nature.

Next, decide how long you wish to meditate. Beginners often start with a short five- to ten-minute practice. Others may choose to meditate for 15-30 minutes or longer. Choose an amount of time that works for you. Set your timer and stay committed to finishing the meditation practice, even if you encounter resistance from your mind. Choose a specific time of the day and an amount of time you wish to meditate and commit to keeping up with that routine.

If you have questions or need guidance, do not hesitate to ask for help. You may choose to seek out guidance from a trained meditation instructor or begin by listening to guided meditations. You can also search your local area for live meditation classes or attend virtual meditation classes online. Consider taking meditation classes with a qualified teacher or finding online resources to assist you.

Stay Committed To Your Meditation Practice

Meditation is most beneficial when done regularly, so do your best to stay committed to your practice and continue to show up even when you don’t necessarily feel like it. Like any skill, meditation takes time and practice.  Remember that even if you have difficulty staying focused when you are meditating, you aren’t doing it wrong.

Keep going and stay committed to your practice. While meditation has many benefits, you likely won’t notice all the benefits immediately. If you or someone you love are interested in starting a meditation practice or need support in maintaining one, look for a qualified meditation teacher near you who can help. You may also consider having a meditation buddy to practice with you so you can both stay committed. Whichever form of meditation you decide on will result in many benefits to your body and mind.