From stress relief to spiritual awakening, this ancient practice proves more relevant than ever
During meditation everyone and deep connection—often interpreted as the soul’s resting place. In this “field” of pure consciousness, we move past rigid, argumentative, or divisive mindsets to meet ourselves and others with an open heart in a place of love and peace.
Long regarded by healers as a cornerstone of optimal wellbeing, meditation is more than a complementary practice—it is foundational. While many therapies can support growth and healing, the deep transformation that leads to wholeness often begins with the awakening that comes from a consistent meditation practice.
Meditation will transform your cognitive, emotional, physical, and spiritual state and provide deep relaxation that can release accumulated stress and increase mental bandwidth. Meditation fosters mindfulness, improves focus, regulates emotions, builds empathy, and can shift us from fear to courage, acting as a powerful tool for navigating a chaotic world.
Many of you may already realize the deep power of meditation and its ability to help you perceive the beauty, truth, and goodness in your world. The results of my practice allow me to more readily witness every thought and action as I’m interacting with my world. With this awareness, I have been able to make subtle positive shifts in my mindset, thought processes, and activities. You, too, will experience the expansion of your consciousness as you discover the power of meditation. The degree to which this happens depends on your level of commitment.
Although thousands of years old, meditation has become quite mainstream. This ancient discipline has been embraced within medical circles as a powerful healing tool with countless research studies to back it up. When Harvard Medical School conducts symposia for medical professionals that solely focus on the mind-body health benefits of mindfulness and meditation, you know something’s up.
Why Meditate?
One of my meditation teachers, Sharon Salzberg, says, “We don’t meditate to get better at meditating. We meditate to get better at life.” The more regularly and deeply you meditate, the sooner you’ll find yourself always living from a center of peace.
To successfully establish a practice you have to want to meditate. This intention is super important. Commit to a meditation practice with a personal statement of intent like: “I intend to commune with Spirit today and every day.” Say it out loud with relish and conviction. Speak it into existence. Sing it, if you’d like.
Become Who You Truly Are
Meditation frees us from the bondage of our egocentricities and the external influences that prevent us from connecting with our soul, that pure consciousness layer of our being where infinite possibilities reside.
It’s here where we access our true source of balance, fulfillment, and wellbeing. Meditation allows us to experience this layer consistently so that profound shifts begin to take place in our lives. We begin to understand who we really are, why we’re here, and how we can creatively and intuitively serve the greater good.
A daily commitment to our practice infuses our mind-body physiology with stability, flexibility, and great resiliency. This helps us develop the capacity to respond skillfully and gracefully to life’s difficulties as well as its joys.
Meditation practitioners attest to the many benefits meditation offers: release of tension, mental clarity, increased energy, heightened optimism, and the ability to remain centered and calm in all situations. Meditation is also a prime pump for compassion, and tremendously enhances our ability to express greater empathy, understanding, forgiveness, and lovingkindness.
Use for Preventative Health Care
Meditation elicits the relaxation response, a term coined by Dr. Herbert Benson, one of the most renowned researchers on meditation and the author of the best-selling classic The Relaxation Response. Meditation moves you into the nervous system’s relaxation mode, also called the “relax, digest, repair” mode. The effects of stress hormones diminish, muscles and fascia relax. It lowers blood pressure, slows down the heart-rate and respiration, and creates greater brain-wave coherence.
Meditators have a thicker cerebral cortex (gray matter) than non-meditators. More brain matter means higher levels of mental acuity and memory retention. Meditation rewires neural circuitry to make us more stress resilient. And on the happiness front, meditation shifts brain waves from right-prefrontal cortex to left-prefrontal cortex, where positive emotions and optimism reside.
Meditation allows you to take your awareness into a deep inner silence. When this happens, mental activity decreases along with overall biochemical activity, giving the mind-body physiology a profound rest deeper than sleep. And for those into longevity (who isn’t!), consider how regular meditation helps maintain or lengthen telomeres— the protective caps on chromosomes—that is associated with slower cellular aging and reduced risk of age-related diseases.
Practicing meditation can regulate hormones and increase levels of serotonin, the brain’s feel-good neurotransmitter. Progressive physicians recommend meditation for its mental health benefits, such as relief from anxiety and depression, increased resistance to potential emotional disturbances, and relief from addictions and self-destructive behaviors.
By virtue of all this, meditation provides a powerful boost to the immune system—our body’s essential, complex defense system against disease.
Pick Your Meditation Form
Meditation comes in a variety of “flavors:” concentrative, passive, mindfulness, lovingkindness, visualization, and movement, to name but a few.
At its heart, meditation refers to time spent in quiet introspection, and however you can best accomplish this will become your form of meditation. Don’t hesitate to mix it up. You may go for long walks, do yoga, tai chi, or Qigong (all moving meditations), focus on the breath, chant, or use a mantra (concentrative techniques). You can write in a journal, pore over devotional books or scriptural verse, listen to inspirational music (including solfeggio frequencies and binaural beats), or gaze at the flickering flame of a candle.
There’s also ecstatic dance, contemplative eating, drumming circle, labyrinth, sweat lodge—all forms of meditation. As long as a given activity takes you to a place of calm, of heightened awareness, of clarity of mind, and of joyfulness, then you’re meditating.
Concentrative meditation is one of the most traditional forms of meditation. It’s the process of intently focusing your attention. It’s giving your single-pointed focus to the object of your attention, such as repeating a mantra or observing the gentle inflow and outflow of your breath. Your concentration can rest in awareness of Self or Spirit, or perhaps your unattached flow of thoughts, as in mindfulness meditation—the practice of noticing mental activity without judgment, emotional reaction, or engagement, allowing thoughts to pass like clouds floating by.
At the end of the day, it is about finding what resonates with you, inspiring you to regularly show up for your practice.
Choose Your Own Mantra
A mantra is a sacred sound, word, or phrase, used to focus and liberate the mind. These repetitive sounds are used in meditation to transcend busy thoughts and enhance concentration. You can choose your own mantra or be assigned one, as in Transcendental Meditation (TM). If you choose your own mantra, pick a word that means something to you and is soothing. It can be your child’s name, or the word, “one,” “peace,” or “love.”
Om is a meaningful mantra, as are other sounds often translated to mean “peace” such as shalom, amen, or salaam. A mantra and breath may be combined as in “So Hum,” which means “I am” and is an auspicious mantra that many enjoy using. “So” on the inhale and “Hum” on the exhale.
Enjoyment of the sound and connection to the meaning contribute to a mantra’s power. As you repeat your mantra along with the inflow and outflow of the breath, the mind may intrude with thoughts. Your goal is to continually keep coming back to your mantra. The more practiced you become, the intrusions of thought become less and less.
Am I Doing This Right?
You can meditate wherever you are, at any time, for as long as you like, and in any way you choose. No matter where, when, why, or how you meditate, know that there’s no wrong way to do it.
If you find yourself falling asleep, it’s all right. It simply means you’re tired! Also, if you find yourself fending off a barrage of thoughts, it’s okay. It indicates you have a lot on your mind and need to release these thoughts that can turn into harmful stress. Importantly, don’t give up! Let the thoughts come and go without getting caught up in them. As the esteemed monk and teacher Shunryu Suzuki says, “Leave your front door and your back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.”
Acknowledge them, but stay calmly detached from them. You can even talk to yourself about this: “What an interesting thought. I’ll get back to you later. Goodbye for now.” Then return to the object of your attention: your mantra, your breath. Keep coming back to what you’re focusing on. This is key to success.
An Essential Pillar of Wellbeing
Along with my daily yoga and pranayama (breathing) practices, meditation is how I stay in the moment, connect with Spirit, stay centered, reduce stress, find inner peace, remain the optimist, problem solve and navigate turmoil, stoke creativity, hone my intuition, even in the face of tremendous challenge.
You have to really want these benefits in your life before you can make a true commitment to meditation. If you do commit, I promise you, that meditation will rock your world. It will change everything about how you experience every facet of your life. Meditation brings on a spiritual awareness that sweeps over us. Once you’ve experienced this, there’s no turning back. Just as with physical exercise, you’ll find that you don’t want to compromise your meditation time. It will become as integral to your day as eating, physical activity, and sleeping.
