What are your thoughts, views, musings and experiences etc. regarding meditation? As we all can learn from each other when it comes to sharing ways of creating a healthy, happy and vibrant life work balance.
It is well known and proven that over time the benefits of meditating on a regular basis promotes the development of inner calmness, connectedness, focus, flow, a clear clarity of mind, a focused and more stable grounded concentration, along with coherency of thought, increased creativity, being more open and receptive to receive insights, solutions to problems and new ideas, a balanced and harmonious centred inner equilibrium, a relaxed happy body, mind and spirit, which in turn assists as a preventative tool that creates and maintains positive overall vibrant health and wellbeing.
Other key health benefits of Meditation include:
It lowers oxygen consumption.
It decreases respiratory rate.
It increases blood flow and slows the heart rate.
It increases exercise tolerance in heart patients.
It leads to a deeper level of relaxation.
It's good for people with high blood pressur...
However, meditation is not as common within Buddhism as most believe. There is a large assumption “that Buddhism and meditation go hand in hand”, but the majority of Buddhists have focused on “cultivating moral behavior, preserving the Buddha’s teachings (dharma), and acquiring good karma”(Braun 2014, p.1). Meditation and Buddhism are often assumed to be one and same, but this is also not true. As Buddhism has gained popularity among lay people it’s practices have changed Buddha’s teaching of the middle path has adapted to meditation being “possible in the city” rather than with monks in jungles and caves (p.4). As seen in Burma, in less than 75 years Buddhism and meditation were able to grow “from a pursuit of the barest sliver of the population to a duty of the ideal citizen” (p.5). While meditation is not the core of Buddhism it has encouraged the growth of Buddhism as it’s practice of mindfulness has been inspiring an approachable model (p.6). Meditation and mindfulness are easily manipulated to secularization, but still have significance in Buddhism and following the patterns of your
From personal experience, mindfulness meditation gives me a feeling of obtaining a healthy mind and body from the attention and peace I obtained. Such feelings resulting from proper practice of mindfulness meditation is not limited to my own testimony though. According to the Satipatthana Sutra, those who practice such in-and-out breathing become “ardent, aware, and mindful” (“Satipatthana Sutra,” Accessed on 2010). However, it is unclear whether such reported experience is genuine or has effect, or if such mindfulness meditation is similar to a placebo effect.
In conclusion, meditation is an important practice that helps people to experience calm and real happiness in the midst of complex situations and issues. From my personal experience, meditation has transformed my old view of self as a failure and helped me develop a positive mental attitude that everything is achievable. Based on these results, I will continue with this practice in the future because it is a major means of personal therapy and self-evaluation. In essence, the process helps in realization of one’s full potential to handle all issues in life.
Meditation allows for you to relax, slow down, and become more aware of yourself and your environment. By meditating in a quiet place with no distraction, you are able to greatly limit the information that is constantly entering into our brains. This information gives us a train of thought that is very difficult to be halted, because it is in the nature of our brains to analyze any information that we have coming in from our senses like what things we are seeing with our eyes and what we are hearing with our ears. By limiting the amount of information that is entering into the brain, we are able to separate ourselves from the mind that is analyzing all of that information and to become aware of it.
In Eastern cultures, meditation has been practiced for over two thousand years. Through this training a culture has developed in which an individual is empowered to engaged in preventative behaviors, which reduce stress and morbidity, resulting in a general state of wellbeing, with stability and mental peace in the face of everyday challenges (Richardson and Lutz, 2008). Over the last half-century, the western-scientific community has begun to evaluate the efficacy of the eastern methods of meditation. In the modern western world there is an over abundance of stress, pressure and over stimulation. These conditions often result in stress-related morbidity, high levels of anxiety and mental illnesses. This cause and effect relationship is well established, and typically emphasis is placed on symptom control and less on preventative behavior modification. There are clinically documented see table 1, meditation practices that can be taught over a short period of time to an individual which have been shown to have positive results. Meditation can be used preventatively in supporting immune function and during illness as a method to aid healing and wellbeing for nominal costs. This paper will make an literary examination of a variety of studies of which examine the role of meditation training in regards to promoting immune function in athletes, recovering cancer patients, in addition to reducing stress and promoting well being in business professionals, cancer patients and seasoned meditation practitioners.
Although meditation has been used for spiritual growth, recently it has become a way of finding a peaceful bridge between stress and the fast paced world around us. It has become a way of taking time out of all the distractions and stress that occurs in our lives and relaxing and finding ourselves. Some other uses of meditation include healing, emotional cleansing and balancing, deepening concentration and insight, manifesting change, developing intuition, unlocking creativity, exploring higher realities, and finding inner guidance.
Psychotherapist and former Buddhist Monk Donald Altman once said, “If you truly want to change your life, you must first be willing to change your mind.” As research suggests, changing your mind can have drastic benefits for your personal health and well-being. Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding experience moment by moment.” (Mindfulness-Based Interventions in Context) “[T]he principles and practices associated with mindfulness have been applied within many of the world’s great spiritual or wisdom traditions for millennia, most notably in Buddhism.” (Dobkin and Hassed 9) In fact, it was a physician from the Rochester School
The purpose of meditation, and mindfulness meditation as mentioned in this course, is to increase awareness while calming the normal thought processes that often overcrowd the mind with ideas that are deemed not-true by Buddhism. These brain scans clearly show that the purpose of meditation is achieved in doing so.
OK. So you’ve heard, that meditation is beneficial for you, maybe you’ve read lists about the advantages of meditation. A ton of different kind of meditations are on-line, and you found several resources, articles, blog posts about the theme to select from. These articles state, that the meditation has countless benefits, which are also proven by scientific research. You can believe them, since eminent scientists carried out extensive research on this subject. And they suggest, you should try them, and of course you should practice it each day. Every day - or you won’t have those benefits.
Meditation is an age-old practice that has renewed itself in many different cultures and times. Despite its age, however, there remains a mystery and some ambiguity as to what it is, or even how one performs it. The practice and tradition of meditation dates back thousands of years having appeared in many eastern traditions. Meditation’s ancient roots cloud its origins from being attributed to a sole inventor or religion, though Bon, Hindu, Shinto, Dao, and later, Buddhism are responsible for its development. Its practice has permeated almost all major world religions, but under different names. It has become a practice without borders, influencing millions with its tranquil and healing effects.
Research of brainwaves implies that meditation can definitely improve health insurance and wellness of the person. Neuroscientists discovered that individuals who meditate can change the mind activity to various regions of the mind. This type of change lessens the results of anxiety and stress. For this reason this type of person more happy and calmer than ever before.
The first grant proposal addressed the effects of meditation on life-span cognitional developmental processes. From my understanding, there is a strong connection to the mindset and self-awareness, as one chooses to mediate for their own reason. Based on the informed information, meditation is used to decrease stress and maintain a healthy lifestyle. The provided background information and predicted research study will help determine the pros and cons of the process, using the meditation techniques.
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). (2010). Health info. Meditation: An introduction. Retrieved from http://nccam.nih.gov/health/meditation/overview.htm
Meditation is not a time devoted to thinking or reflecting about oneself, but a time to redirect one’s thoughts and emotions away from the outside world and onto something simple, such as the wind or one’s own breathe. By learning how to meditate, an individual can learn how to react appropriately to “the circumstances one finds oneself in, i...
Meditating on a daily basis is crucial to our overall health and well-being. The World Health Organization defines health as, “The absence of illness or maladies but also as a psycho-dynamic state consisting of people 's physical, mental, social and spiritual aspects.” Oshita, D., Hattori, K., & Iwakuma, M. (2013) Studies have shown that regular mediation sessions reduce high blood pressure and stress. Another wonderful side effect of meditating is feeling an overwhelming sense of peace and happiness. Everyone should meditate!