When I told a chum of mine yesterday that I needed to postpone a movie-watching adventure because I needed to meditate – it seemed to peak his interest. Not used to hearing those words (nor expecting them to come from me), he said how he’d thought about it many times before, but hasn’t ever actually given it a go — though he’d like to some time. He made the claim to wanting more information on the topic, and I realized that he probably wouldn’t be the only one.
Below are multiple articles looking at meditation through various lenses of perspective. If you click on the article titles, you will be taken to the originals themselves, and then able to link to gobs of other articles surrounding the topic and its other informational relatives.
Many thanks to Ian for inciting (without even realizing it!) the spread of this information, and the opening up of this discussion. Good on ya, mate! :)
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The Science of Meditation
Meditation may help squash anxiety. The practice brings about dramatic effects in as little as a 10-minute session.
In the highlands of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, people look at life differently. Upon entering the local Buddhist monastery, there is a spectacular sculpture the size of a large oak. The intricate carving of clouds and patterns are painted in powerful colors. But as soon as winter gives way, this magnificent work will melt to nothing. The sculpture, in fact, is made of butter, and it is one of the highland people’s symbols of the transient nature of life.
And life here is not easy. Villagers bicycle to work before dawn and return home long after sunset. Many live with nothing more than dirt floors and rickety outhouses. Upon entering these modest mud-brick homes, you’ll find no tables or chairs—just a long platform bed, which sleeps a family of eight. However, when the people invite you in for tea, their smiles are wide and welcoming. How do they possess such inner calm in conditions we would call less than ideal?
When villagers cook, sew or plow the fields, they do so in a tranquil state. As an approach to life, weaving meditation seamlessly into almost every action throughout the day seems unfamiliar to Western cultures. Is there something we can glean from this way of life that will improve our own? The romantic notion of quitting everything and joining Tibetan monks on a mountaintop is not the only way to meditate. You don’t need to quit your job, give up your possessions and spend 30 years chanting. Recent research indicates that meditating brings about dramatic effects in as little as a 10-minute session. Several studies have demonstrated that subjects who meditated for a short time showed increased alpha waves (the relaxed brain waves) and decreased anxiety and depression.
Meditation: What is It?
Aside from determining its physiological effects, defining the actual act of meditation can be as elusive as imagining the sound of one hand clapping. In his book, “What is Meditation?” (Shambhala Publications, 1999), Rob Nairn talks about it as a state of “bare attention.” He explains, “It is a highly alert and skillful state of mind because it requires one to remain psychologically present and ‘with’ whatever happens in and around one without adding to or subtracting from it in any way.”
The physical act of meditation generally consists of simply sitting quietly, focusing on one’s breath, a word or phrase. However, a meditator may also be walking or standing. It isn’t unusual, in fact, to see a meditating monk in the highlands walking a few steps and then lying prostrate over and over again until he reaches his destination many miles away.
There are many traditions and countless ways to practice meditation, and perhaps because of its polymorphous nature new meditators wonder whether they are doing it correctly. According to Roger Thomson, Ph.D., a psychologist in private practice in Chicago and a Zen meditator, there is one way to know for sure: “If you’re feeling better at the end, you are probably doing it right.”
Thomson makes it sound easy, but many people can’t seem to get the hang of it, no matter how often they try. “It can be difficult,” says Steven Hendlin, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in Irvine, California. “It may be a struggle to overcome the internal chatter that we all experience.”
Seeking methods for quieting that internal chatter and reducing stress are what initially attract many people to meditation. “It is a very effective stress-reducer, which is a way into the practice for many people,” says Thomson, who sometimes refers clients to meditation. “If someone is struggling with feelings of anxiety, he or she may benefit from its calming aspects. And it’s absolutely facilitative of mental health because it brings about a higher level of self-acceptance and insight about oneself.”
But greater awareness about oneself can be a double-edged sword. Mark Epstein, M.D., a New York City psychiatrist in private practice and a meditation practitioner, extends a caution about one of the ironies of meditating. “It could actually raise your level of anxiety if there are certain feelings you are not owning.” In other words, there’s nowhere to hide when you’re practicing “bare attention.” And this, for some people, is both the good and the bad news.
That’s why some experts suggest marrying meditation to psychotherapy. “Both allow the person to be present for the moment, open and nondefensive,” says Thomson, who explores the complementary nature of the two in a paper published in the American Journal of Psychotherapy. “In both meditation and psychotherapy, we are trying not to get caught up in internal preoccupation, but to be intimately present with what is happening here and now.”
To explain his thoughts on the connection, Thomson compares Zen to relational psychoanalytical theories. He writes that it “encourages its practitioners to become aware of the fundamentally distorted aspects of an overly individualistic view of human experience. Recognizing that the true nature of all individuals is emphatically non-individual, neither lasting nor separate, is the wisdom of Zen.”
Silence and Science
Certainly anything that helps us fight stress is a welcome tool. But what else might meditation be doing for us? Since researchers like Herbert Benson, M.D. began amassing data, many studies have shown that indeed meditation has not only a mental but a profound physiological effect on the body. Studies have shown that, among other benefits, meditation can help reverse heart disease, the number-one killer in the U.S. It can reduce pain and enhance the body’s immune system, enabling it to better fight disease.
More new research offers additional encouragement. In a study published last year in the journal Stroke, 60 African-Americans with atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, practiced meditation for six to nine months. (African-Americans are twice as likely to die from cardiovascular disease as are whites.) The meditators showed a marked decrease in the thickness of their artery walls, while the nonmeditators actually showed an increase. The change for the meditation group could potentially bring about an 11 percent decrease in the risk of heart attack and an 8 percent to 15 percent decrease in the risk of stroke.
A second study, published last year in Psychosomatic Medicine, taught a randomized group of 90 cancer patients mindful meditation (another type of practice). After seven weeks, those who had meditated reported that they were significantly less depressed, anxious, angry and confused than the control group, which hadn’t practiced meditation. The meditators also had more energy and fewer heart and gastrointestinal problems than did the other group.
Other recent research has looked at precisely what happens during meditation that allows it to cause these positive physical changes. Researchers at the Maharishi School of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, found that meditation has a pervasive effect on stress. They looked at a group of people who had meditated for four months and found that they produced less of the stress hormone cortisol. They were therefore better able to adapt to stress in their lives, no matter what their circumstances were.
Diana Adile Kirschner, Ph.D., a Philadelphia-area clinical psychologist, sometimes refers her clients to learn meditation and has seen firsthand how helpful it can be. “Not only is meditation an absolutely marvelous destressor, it helps people better relate to one another,” she says. “I can tell when clients are following through with meditation. For instance, I had a couple who consistently bickered. After they started meditating, they came in less angry, more self-reflective and more loving.”
So why aren’t more people taking up the practice? “Because it puts us in the middle of ourselves, which is not always where we want to be,” suggests Thomson. “Often, we want to fix things rather than accept them the way they are. Many of us feel as though we can’t afford the time and energy to meditate, when in fact we can’t afford not to.”
Epstein and several other experts feel that meditation’s effectiveness has to do with putting aside attachment to one’s ego. As he says, “When you look directly at a star at night, it’s difficult to see. But when you look away slightly, it comes into focus. I find it to be the same way with the ego and meditating. When one zeroes in on a sense of self through a practice of meditation, the self-important ego paradoxically becomes elusive. You become more aware that you are interconnected with other beings, and you can better put your own worries into their proper perspective.”
A group of elderly Chinese maintain their connection by meeting every daybreak in the village common in Monterey Park, California. They swoop their arms and stretch their torsos in graceful harmony, and then stand absolutely still, simply meditating. Only puffs of warm air flow from their nostrils. All of them look vibrant and relatively young, when in fact they are well into their years.
While western scientists are still exploring exactly how and why meditation works, we already know that it has both physiological and psychological benefits. And many therapists consider it a valid complement to more traditional therapies. So perhaps we should simply take Thomson’s advice—and the Tibetans’ lead—and do what makes us feel better in the end.
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100 Benefits of Meditation
By Frederic Premji on May 08 2008
There are so many advantages to meditation. When I first originally thought of this post, I indeed wanted to make it 100 benefits long (think big right!), however, I wasn’t sure I could find more than perhaps 20-25 benefits. Well, I made it happen! Meditation is as powerful as I thought it would be. Here is the definitive list of benefits that meditation can provide you with:
Physiological benefits:
1- It lowers oxygen consumption.
2- It decreases respiratory rate.
3- It increases blood flow and slows the heart rate.
4- Increases exercise tolerance.
5- Leads to a deeper level of physical relaxation.
6- Good for people with high blood pressure.
7- Reduces anxiety attacks by lowering the levels of blood lactate.
8- Decreases muscle tension
9- Helps in chronic diseases like allergies, arthritis etc.
10- Reduces Pre-menstrual Syndrome symptoms.
11- Helps in post-operative healing.
12- Enhances the immune system.
13- Reduces activity of viruses and emotional distress
14- Enhances energy, strength and vigour.
15- Helps with weight loss
16- Reduction of free radicals, less tissue damage
17- Higher skin resistance
18- Drop in cholesterol levels, lowers risk of cardiovascular disease.
19- Improved flow of air to the lungs resulting in easier breathing.
20- Decreases the aging process.
21- Higher levels of DHEAS (Dehydroepiandrosterone)
22- prevented, slowed or controlled pain of chronic diseases
23- Makes you sweat less
24- Cure headaches & migraines
25- Greater Orderliness of Brain Functioning
26- Reduced Need for Medical Care
27- Less energy wasted
28- More inclined to sports, activities
29- Significant relief from asthma
30- improved performance in athletic events
31- Normalizes to your ideal weight
32- harmonizes our endocrine system
33- relaxes our nervous system
34- produce lasting beneficial changes in brain electrical activity
35- Cure infertility (the stresses of infertility can interfere with the release of hormones that regulate ovulation).
Psychological benefits:
36- Builds self-confidence.
37- Increases serotonin level, influences mood and behaviour.
38- Resolve phobias & fears
39- Helps control own thoughts
40- Helps with focus & concentration
41- Increase creativity
42- Increased brain wave coherence.
43- Improved learning ability and memory.
44- Increased feelings of vitality and rejuvenation.
45- Increased emotional stability.
46- improved relationships
47- Mind ages at slower rate
48- Easier to remove bad habits
49- Develops intuition
50- Increased Productivity
51- Improved relations at home & at work
52- Able to see the larger picture in a given situation
53- Helps ignore petty issues
54- Increased ability to solve complex problems
55- Purifies your character
56- Develop will power
57- greater communication between the two brain hemispheres
58- react more quickly and more effectively to a stressful event.
59- increases one’s perceptual ability and motor performance
60- higher intelligence growth rate
61- Increased job satisfaction
62- increase in the capacity for intimate contact with loved ones
63- decrease in potential mental illness
64- Better, more sociable behaviour
65- Less aggressiveness
66- Helps in quitting smoking, alcohol addiction
67- Reduces need and dependency on drugs, pills & pharmaceuticals
68- Need less sleep to recover from sleep deprivation
69- Require less time to fall asleep, helps cure insomnia
70- Increases sense of responsibility
71- Reduces road rage
72- Decrease in restless thinking
73- Decreased tendency to worry
74- Increases listening skills and empathy
75- Helps make more accurate judgements
76- Greater tolerance
77- Gives composure to act in considered & constructive ways
78- Grows a stable, more balanced personality
79- Develops emotional maturity
Spiritual benefits:
80- Helps keep things in perspective
81- Provides peace of mind, happiness
82- Helps you discover your purpose
83- Increased self-actualization.
84- Increased compassion
85- Growing wisdom
86- Deeper understanding of yourself and others
87- Brings body, mind, spirit in harmony
88- Deeper Level of spiritual relaxation
89- Increased acceptance of oneself
90- helps learn forgiveness
91- Changes attitude toward life
92- Creates a deeper relationship with your God
93- Attain enlightenment
94- greater inner-directedness
95- Helps living in the present moment
96- Creates a widening, deepening capacity for love
97- Discovery of the power and consciousness beyond the ego
98- Experience an inner sense of “Assurance or Knowingness”
99- Experience a sense of “Oneness”
100- Increases the synchronicity in your life
Meditation is also completely FREE! It requires no special equipment, and is not complicated to learn. It can be practiced anywhere, at any given moment, and it is not time consuming (15-20 min. per day is good). Best of all, meditation has NO negative side effects. Bottom line, there is nothing but positive to be gained from it! With such a huge list of benefits, the question you should ask yourself is, “why am I not meditating yet?”
If you need a point to start from, you should try guided meditation courses. They are inexpensive and can provide you with a good foundation from which to begin meditating.
Make sure you meditate, there are quite simply too many positives to just ignore it.
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To enhance concentration
Meditation has an undeserved reputation for being esoteric and difficult to learn. In truth, it’s really nothing more than the practice of focusing the mind intently on a particular thing or activity. It seems logical that regular meditation would hone a person’s powers of concentration, and a recent study in the Journal of Neuroscience found just that. In the study, three months of intensive meditation training led to improvements in attentional stability – the ability to sustain attention without frequent lapses.
To lower blood pressure
Research suggests that meditation may help lower blood pressure. In astudy published in the American Journal of Hypertension, 298 college students were randomly assigned to either a Transcendental Meditation (TM) group or a waiting list (control) group. The study found that TM helped the students decrease psychological distress and increase coping ability. More interestingly, in a subgroup of students at risk for high blood pressure later in life, these changes were associated with a reduction in blood pressure. That’s heartening news, because young adults with even slight elevations in blood pressure have a three times greater risk of developing full-blown high blood pressure within the next 30 years.
To improve sleep
Research indicates that meditation may help fight insomnia. In a study from India’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, researchers looked at how sleep was affected by vipassana meditation. This form of meditation involves focusing the mind on mental and physical processes in order to develop insight. The study included 105 healthy men between the ages of 30 and 60. Half were experienced vipassana meditators, and half had no experience with any type of meditation. The meditators showed enhanced slow wave (deep) sleep and REM sleep across all age groups. In contrast, the non-meditators showed a pronounced decline in slow wave sleep with age, a sign of declining sleep quality in the older men.
To manage pain
One of the best-studied medical uses of meditation is for helping manage chronic pain. The form of meditation often employed for this purpose is mindfulness meditation, which involves fully focusing on whatever is being experienced from moment to moment. The idea is to take note of the here-and-now experience without judging or reacting to it. For chronic pain sufferers, mindfulness may help them notice and accept their pain without becoming anxious and panicky, which just makes the pain worse. However, a study from the University of Montreal suggests that long-term practice of mindfulness meditation may also lead to physical changes in the brain that directly affect pain perception. The study matched 17 expert meditators with non-meditators of the same age and gender. Structural MRI brain scans showed that the meditators had a thicker cortex in certain pain-related areas of the brain. This cortical thickening was associated with lower pain sensitivity.
To live longer
Meditation may influence not only quality of life, but also quantity. Three converging lines of research explain why. One, meditation may help counter the body’s stress response and all the physical wear and tear that goes along with chronic stress. Two, meditation may help slow aging by decreasing oxidative stress – cellular damage caused by highly reactive molecules known as free radicals. Several studies have linked meditation to reductions in various measures of oxidative stress. There is also evidence of enhanced activity by antioxidants – molecules that defend the body against free radicals – during meditation. Three, meditation may help fight chronic inflammation throughout the body, which contributes to diseases as diverse as obesity, atherosclerosis, diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Research indicates that meditation can dampen several inflammatory processes.
To connect with others
Meditation might seem like the ultimate in self-absorption. But at least one form of meditation, known as loving-kindness meditation, also seems to help build a sense of social connectedness. In loving-kindness meditation, the mind is sharply focused on compassionate feelings and well wishes that are directed toward real or imagined others. A study in the journal Emotion found that just a few minutes of this form of meditation practice increased positive, connected feelings toward strangers.
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If you’ve been reading my blog you’ll know that I found myself falling into Zen practice and working very hard at mindfulness. But it’s SO hard to keep going. If you’ve ever meditated you may well have found the same problem. Like mindfulness, meditation skills can easily be lost, and the motivation can become buried by the burdens of everyday life.
I knew I wanted to ask some really difficult questions – like “Who am I?” “What is consciousness?” but to do that I needed a clear mind – and that meant I had to keep meditating – ideally every day without fail.
Just about everyone who meditates regularly says they have, or once had, trouble establishing regular daily practice. For me it was the encounter with mindfulness that made it possible, but some hints and tips from others also helped a lot. So I pass them on in case they are of any use.
Personally I’m not prepared to give that much time outside of retreats, nor do I want to agonise each day about whether I’m going to sit or not. So I meditate for about 15 minutes a day, first thing in the morning, often with my partner, and this suits me well. It seems, gradually, to establish deep changes that I welcome, and it is – after all – a lot better than nothing. Most obviously, calming the mind becomes gradually easier. You may be able to do a lot more than I do and that would probably make for much deeper practice, but I am sure that a little is better than none, and every day is better than intermittently.
I was once helped greatly by someone who told me this “Commit yourself to sitting on your cushion every day. That’s all; if you want to stop after 3 seconds that’s fine.” I found this rather odd advice extremely useful and that is the extent of my personal commitment now. There are, in fact, rare occasions when I sit for only a few seconds – for example, if I have overslept and have a train to catch, or when some crisis has just occurred. More often, if I don’t feel like sitting, I still force myself onto the cushion, expecting to last only a few minutes, and then somehow, once I’m there, it seems quite pleasant. Five minutes goes by – or even fifteen. Either way I have stuck to my commitment, and have a regular practice that gradually deepens.
I have described some of my own practice here because it may be relevant to understanding the way I asked the questions. It should be clear that I have learned a variety of skills over the years, and that some, though not all, of them are part of traditional Zen training.
“Ten Zen Questions” is about how I have used these techniques to tackle ten difficult questions; you might say, using consciousness to look into itself.
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When I began training in Zen, the prime motivation of most of us was existential. We wanted to resolve burning questions such as Who am I? What is the mind? What is my essential nature? What is the true nature of reality? Fair enough, these remain key questions, and Zen practice, perhaps koan practice in particular, provides a good vehicle.
But meditation can also help bear with (stand, in contradistinction to understand) and make use of, even transform, what Buddhists call afflictive experience, what we know as emotional pain. How? By learning to attend mindfully, in real time, to the spinning flux of bodily, emotional and mental experience as it arises, coalesces, and as we get bogged down in (or “attached to”) it. By way of personal example, during a painful period I once found myself with profound feelings of sadness and loss. In one sense, I knew that they were part and parcel of grieving, a normal human process. I tried to be gentle with myself, allow it time, and engage it fully. As time went on, motivated by the desire to be fully alive and fully functioning, and the continuing flurries of affect, I began to observe closely just how the pain constituted and unfolded, how I participated in it, and how my attentiveness and lack of it affected things. When I was aware and mindful, I could notice proto-feelings, not fully developed, and how these would be elaborated in a associative series that came through and coalesced rapidly into a story line which would draw almost automatically to itself supporting memories, songs and so on such that before long a concerto in the key of sadness and loss was playing. I would be feeling fine and then, within moments, find myself in a funk. When I was able to both engage and observe — not a given during such emotionally charged times, even for a Zen teacher — I could begin to see that this experience began as a kind of a spasm, a contraction; it was not born fully developed. I could notice, however arduous it was to stay present, how my manner of paying attention, what I attended to and how, could either accelerate or decelerate or transform the direction of the process. Now of course mourning is part of living and psychotherapy allows us to safely and deeply explore the dynamic content of these experiences and can be crucial during the really tough times. But attention to the process is what meditation brings to the table, especially when the dynamic themes and affective accompaniments become like a broken record.
In Zen practice, when there are distractions during zazen, we teach the value of three R’s: recognizing what’s happening (thoughts, feelings or bodily sensations and combinations of these), remembering that this is a learnable moment, and returning to our focus, say counting our breaths. This can also be valuable to practice during turbulent times when a powerful emotion seems to fill the screen and a ray of awareness is hard to mobilize. Coming to see how we selectively “water” certain emotional states is a gateway. We may not be able to control what arises, but we do have some say so in how we respond, moment to moment. It takes intention, devoted, dogged attention, and an accepting, gentle attitude toward ourselves and what we observe. The fruits can be liberating.
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Well, there you have it, my darlings — a handful of articles discussing meditation from various angles, hopefully enticing you to dig a bit deeper yourself.
I know lots of people who immediately write off the idea of meditation because it seems too hippie-ish, or flighty, or not rooted in anything solid. Are you one of these people? Well, how about the person who thinks that meditation is rooted in religion, and you don’t want to feel any kind of pressure in this arena? Does that ring true for you at all? Have you ever looked into it? Given in a whirl? If that first style didn’t work for you, did you ever try a different one, or did you just write meditation off entirely? Hmm…
Meditation really is an amazingly powerful practice to get involved with, and there aren’t any negatives to it; everything it does for you is a positive. It’s rooted in the self, and while you can certainly choose to affiliate it with your own religious beliefs and/or practices, it does not have any inherent religious connections. Meditation is very much its own hyper-malleable entity that is just waiting for you to shape it into whatever you need it to become for yourself. And the really amazing part is – whatever shape it does take on for you and your life, you will experience some really fantastic positive shifts as a result.
Whether you believe me or not, don’t you think you owe it to yourself to legitimately try it out first hand to see one way or the other? Something that requires so little of you, and yet offers up this much potential for greatness – how can you call that anything but a gift!
I am very much an anti-routine kind of person, so I still struggle constantly with keeping up with a regular practice. But, no matter how much time passes since my last session, I ALWAYS come back to it. I personally practice Vedic Meditation – but it’s great because there are so many different kinds of meditation and styles of practice that everyone can find the one that seems to be the best fit. I highly suggest checking it out for yourself — seeing which option(s) might sound best for you and your lifestyle.
That said, I don’t have anyone in my world (aside from my meditation teacher herself) who meditates at all nevertheless daily. (If I’m mistaken, and do have some closeted meditators amongst my circles, then please let me hear ya now!) If this is something that interests you, please contact me about it; it’s always better to have a community around something like this than to try to constantly forge ahead all by your lonesome.
So, my little sugar plums – please do yourself a favor and open your mind to the possibilities that this might be able to provide to you as well. Good luck to you as you choose to continue to journey deeper within yourself, and within the opportunities that life has to offer. I’m always here for communication and connection . . . :)
with passion & gratitude — jennifer