Benefits Of Meditation

With our busy hectic lives and constant reminder of all the things we should be doing, why add one more thing?  To put it succinctly, the benefits to meditation are extensive and powerful. That’s why so many people are turning to meditation helps create peace, balance and deeper understanding.

Before investing time and effort into a daily practice or even the exploration of meditation it’s a good idea to weigh the pros and cons of practice. Many people have heard that it can help reduce stress and make them feel calmer. Below is a summary of many of the benefits to meditation.

• Reduce Stress
• Increase Awareness
• Be More Open
• Deepen understanding of the world around you
• Deepen understanding of barriers to awareness
• Increase flexibility of your mind
• Understand and appreciate other perspectives

What is mindfulness?

People have been talking a lot about mindfulness these days.

Everywhere you look there is more information on mindfulness,

the benefits of mindfulness and ways to be more mindful.

But what does it all mean?

In it’s essence mindfulness can be described as follows:

• Being Present, right here, right now
• Not struggling
• Not grasping or rejecting
• Accepting what is as it is without judgment

Benefits of Meditation: Reduce Stress?

Meditation can reduce stress thru a variety of methods. The simplest of which is to connect with your breath. The use of the 4-7-8 Breathing technique is a first step in this direction. This breathing technique teaches us to slow our breathing down and make an otherwise automatic process aware and intentionally controlled. If you haven’t done this before you may notice many odd sensations controlling the breath. Some people may even initially get a sense of feeling out of breath. But this passes with time and practice. For most people the act of slowing the breath deepens our mind body connection and helps us deal with stress.

4-7-8 Breathing technique

• Start with deep cleansing breaths thru nose deep into the abdomen
• Breathing in for a long slow count of 4 (thru nose)
• Holding breath for a long slow count of 7
• Breathing out slowly for a long slow count of 8 (thru mouth)
• Pause briefly noticing the temporary nature of breath
• Repeat 5-6 times
  • Breathing in
    • I Breathe in peace and connection
  • Breathing Out
    • I Breathe out pain and sorrow
  • Body Scan notice How you feel now

Benefits of Meditation: Improve Mind Body Connection

One of the benefits of using breathing techniques consciously is slowing our heart rate. Have you ever noticed when you get anxious typically your attention is hyper focused and your heart rate increases. If this process continues naturally it will peak into a fight/flight/flee/freeze response. After which we will come back to stasis and our heart rate and attention go back to a more relaxed state. This is very beneficial if we are running for our lives, but what if it is an argument with our boss or spouse. In this case we may want to gain more control over the process so we don’t say or do something we later regret. This is why we learn to reduce this response thru breathing techniques to slow and deepen our breath. This in turn reduces our heart rate. When our heart rate reduces our parasympathetic nervous system is engaged and we slow our  network.

When the parasympathetic nervous system is engaged we can think more rationally and think better. This is really activating the mammalian brain or pre-frontal cortex where most higher level of thought occurs. Allowing us to focus on thought instead of threat appraisal and reaction gives us a sense of peace and well-being in addition to better problem solving. This benefit to meditation can be coupled with increased awareness to make a powerful change in mood and emotional state.

Increasing Awareness

By moving our attention from our daily stresses and looming problems we free our energy to work on other activities. When we slow our threat appraisal system we can then use this energy in other ways. One way to use this energy is to increase broader awareness of our environment. Often we are only focused on what is directly in front of us, a concern, a problem, a goal to achieve. But what about sunsets, what about all of the wonderful things that occur every day that we take for granted and pay so little attention to. Just because these things  require little ongoing attention from us doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t benefit from more attention. How much time do we contemplate ways to help our families, friends or community. How much bigger could our impact and enjoyment with life be if we were able to see the bigger picture, to slow down and to free ourselves from the day to day grind and worries?

Benefits of Meditation: Be More Open

As we open to the diversity of options in any given moment our lives seem to become more peaceful, less driven and the possibilities grow exponentially. As options increase we can slow down and not worry so much about the outcomes. This truly frees our mind to be more present and relaxed and sense the real possibilities that life has to offer at any moment. If we can move past our focused goals and outcomes we may experience wonderful possiblilties that we never considered or would have otherwise explored. It can be trying moving thru these changes in direction and accepting new paths thru life but the  rewards can be vast and liberating. For instance that flat tire you get when you were running late for an appointment may cause you to avoiding an accident or may lead to meeting somebody who becomes a close friend. You just never know what will come your way thru life. However, if you do the same thing all the time and are rigid to the possibilities and diversity of life your life will stagnant and becoming boring and predictable.

Benefits of Meditation: Deepen understanding of the world around you

Sometimes meditation can be about a peaceful relaxation and connection to the joy that surrounds us at any time. And sometimes meditation can help us contemplate a problem and see things from more than one perspective. I remember being frustrated with a decision a boss made once. I went into my little king mode thinking about how things would be different if I made the decisions. How much better things could be and how much more in control I would be. As I deepened my meditation I contemplated all of the decisions I could make and all the ways I could influence the world around me. Then a funny thing happened which I never expected.

As I gave myself the openness to engage in this shadow side of myself and consider all I could do, I started to realize the limitations to my understanding of the problems my boss faced. I realized how complex these decisions could be and how many things they could impact. Things I might in turn be blamed and responsible for. As this continued I started to develop and appreciation for not needing to make decisions and to be at peace with someone else taking the responsibility and me being able to just focus on my duties. While I still didn’t like the decision it did deepen my understanding and appreciation for the situation.

Benefits of Meditation: Deepen understanding of barriers to awareness

Without a doubt the biggest barrier to awareness is fear. Fear is a condition where we try desperately to avoid a situation from getting worse. We may think about the problem over and over trying to come up with other solutions. We may talk to our friends to solicit their opinions and consider other options. Then we may get online and do research for solutions. One of the benefits of meditation is helping us stop and deepen our undestanding and barriers to awareness.

But rarely do we stop, breathe and consider the problem itself. How bad is it really, what if we don’t resolve it, what if we can accept this turn of events what will happen. When we approach life from this flexible position things may turn out a lot differently then we ever imagined. We may also greatly grow in our understanding of the situation and to be much more aware of ourselves, our reactions and how we relate to life. When we stop the problem solving and appreciate the situation for what it is our awareness broadens. As our awareness broadens we sense more options and possibilities and become less hyper focused and overwhelmed. Ironically, this is just the energy and perspective where our larger mind can function better to problem solve from an intuitive natural perspective.

Benefits of Meditation: Increase flexibility of your mind

Spending time in daily meditation, even if it’s just 5-10 minutes can create new levels of mental flexibility. This is just like stretching or exercise. We have to do the work, not just read or think about it. This increased flexibility of mind is a direct result of being able to focus and concentrate attention. For example, consider the act of turning inward and focusing on the breath and the space between the in breath and the out breath. During this time the mind starts to rest, focusing attention on the body, then moving attention away to thoughts of the day, activities coming up, solutions to problems and so on. During this time, if we redirect our thoughts back to our breath we gain control or influence over our attention. Imagine how powerful this can be if we are getting worked up over challenges in our daily life and then decide to focus on something much more soothing and wider in perspective.

Benefits of Meditation: Understand and appreciate other perspectives

Being able to understand and appreciate life from other perspectives is a significant benefit to meditation. For example, events often happen to us that we don’t anticipate or even particularly enjoy. Sometimes these events  end up being pivotal moments in our life. To the extent that we are flexible and open to the flow of our lives and the world around us we will be better able to adapt and benefit from changes. If we are mindful of our intentions and direction in life, but open to the process of getting there we may find the universe conspiring to help us. IF however, we are stuck in routine and specific process to achieve goals we may miss the opportunities right in front of us.

We may ruin great moments by worrying about things out of our control. For example, imagine we are on date night with our spouse. We are worried about work trying hard to relax. We can’t enjoy the evening because were are running late for a movie. The restaurant is really busy and we do everything we can to move things along. We drop hints to the waiter, we ask to talk with a manager. We finally finish and get to the movie 15 minutes late. And find out the movie really stinks. It was a real dud. However, 30 minutes later another movie played and everyone loved the movie. In this example, we missed the benefits of meditation and mindfulness several times.

• We didn’t enjoy dinner
• We didn’t make our partner feel special or happy
• We made our waiter and manager tense and uncomfortable
• We went to a lousy movie and had we been more flexible we might have just gone to the better movie.

Of course, there are times where we need to be more structured, but how many times does our agenda interfere with the joy of the present moment. If you are interested in the benefits of meditation reading books, listening to podcasts or attending our drop in group is a great way to start.

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Information provided on this site does not constitute a patient therapist relationship, and should be used under the guidance of a licensed mental health professional. Information presented on this page was written by James Meyer, LCSW Lead Counselor and founder of Lions Heart Counseling Sacramento.