Meditation: what's it all about? - Health & Wellbeing
Scientists now have good evidence that meditation has a wide range of health benefits. But it can be hard for beginners to work out what it's all about.
People have been meditating in different cultures throughout the world for thousands of years, usually as a way of finding inner peace and becoming closer to God.
These days meditation is not just for the spiritual. There's growing evidence it can be a potent tool to enhance your health and wellbeing.
But if you're thinking about it or wanting to trying to meditate, it's easy to be confused by the variety of meditation on offer.
What is meditation?
Definitions of meditation vary, however, many forms involve training your mind to pay attention.
The Australian Meditation Association says 'in its broadest and most universal definition, meditation is a discipline that involves turning the mind and attention inward and focusing on a single thought, image, object or feeling'.
Meditation helps develop skills in:
- knowing what your mind is paying attention to,
- working out where your mind's attention needs to be focused,
- maintaining attention on what you want your mind to be focusing on.
it is particularly helpful in preventing your mind from infusing with the past, worrying about the future and creating negative thoughts. These thoughts can leave us open to mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety, or just feeling stressed (which in turn can increase our risk of poor physical health).
Feeling relaxed and focused can be an immediate side effect of practising meditation, but evidence now suggests meditation has many long-term health benefits. It can also help improve mental performance.
Is meditation a religious practice?
You don't need to be religious to practise or benefit from meditation. But meditation is part of most major religions and the forms of meditation practised in this context often involve developing a heightened spiritual awareness. If you want, you can also expand your practise of meditation to explore more spiritual aspects once you have learned some basic meditation skills.
Are there different forms of meditation?
There are many different forms of meditation that encourage you to focus your attention either on something or visualise within.
What is the most forms of meditation.
Common forms of meditation include mindfulness, Zen Buddhist, transcendental, Vipassana and Sahaja. The aim of most of these practices is to rest in the stillness underneath the thinking mind.
Much of the research on the health effects of meditation has centred on mindfulness, which involves focusing on sensations, such as the breath or feelings in different parts of the body, to help direct your attention onto the present moment. You can also practise mindfulness in a less formal way by focusing on sensations during daily activities like having a shower, walking or even eating a meal. Mindfulness is therefore both a form of meditation and a way of living. Learning to focus attention on what is being experienced here and now, without reacting to or judging it, is central to mindfulness practices.
Meditation has been shown to trigger a wide variety of changes in the brain and body.
One of the costs of having a distracted and inattentive mind is the over-activation of the "stress response" – the "fight or flight" response – that prepares us to either fight off or escape situations we perceive as dangerous or threatening. This stress response can be triggered inappropriately when we:
- imagine situations to be more threatening than they really are,
- worry about events that may not actually happen,
- repeatedly go over events that have already been and gone.
Some research suggests this causes "wear and tear" on our body that over time, increases our risk of illness.
There are now many hundreds of studies published in scientific journals showing that meditation, practised regularly, can be helpful in managing, preventing and coping with a range of mental and physical health problems.
These include:
- depression
- anxiety
- drug rehabilitation and quitting smoking
- insomnia
- asthma
- ADHD
- chronic pain
How can meditation help health?
There is also research to suggest meditation can help boost immunity, improve DNA repair (a cellular process important to preventing a range of illnesses) and slow the changes to DNA that occur with ageing (and predispose us to diseases associated with ageing such as cancer
Would you like to Learn to Meditate or be able to Meditate more effectively
Contact RoseLyn Today on 0428 648100
Location: Pittsworth / Toowoomba QLD 4356, Australia
- Phone: 0428 648 100
- Email: reconnecttoday@bigpond.com
- Services : Reconnective Healing®, The Reconnection®, Distant Healing.
- - Certified Foundational Practitioner- of Reconnective Healing™
- - Certified Practitioner - for The Reconnection™
- Fee: Contact for session price- Ph: 0428 648100 or
- Email: reconnecttoday@bigpond.com
