Your Physical, Mental, and Emotional Health Benefits of Meditation and Mindfulness (Way to Reduce Stress and So Much More for Your Life and Personal Fulfillment)
In recent years meditation has become increasingly popular for its numerous positive effects on your mind and body. It is a very simple practice that doesn’t require special skill or talent, and yet produces such desired health and personal outcomes for the practitioners.
In this article, we will focus on emotional, mental and physical health benefits that you will experience if you start to meditate regularly. Also, in the bonus section you will receive simple yet very effective tips on how you can start a successful practice.
1. Introduction
A. Definition of Meditation
Meditation is an ancient practice that has been used for thousands of years across various personal development systems and spiritual traditions. Meditation is an umbrella term for many techniques and methods of very old as well as most modern practices.
It involves focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity in order to train attention and awareness, achieving a mentally clear and emotionally calm state. Through meditation, you can reflect, contemplate, and realize, and it is a path to personal growth, spiritual awakening and enlightenment.
B. Effects of Meditation
Rather than becoming a different person, a new person, or a better person, it is an art of being serene and alert in the present moment instead of constantly struggling to change yourself or to become someone else.
The whole point of any meditation program is for you to accept and love yourself. As this process takes place your quality of life improves and you start to be more connected to your inner self as well as more aware of other people and the outer world.
C. Meditation as a Way to Reduce Stress
Mindfulness-based stress reduction is the most effective way to manage day to day pressure and tension. It is due to lack of self-awareness that anxiety and irrational fears exist in the mind. When you sit in meditation, your body is put to rest. You can just observe what passes through your consciousness without judgement or reaction. This enables to more easily let go of worries and proves very good for your overall health.
D. General Health Benefits
Meditation in itself is a complementary and integrative health self-care, due to the fact that it promotes self-regulatory processes in your body. When your mind is calm, focused, and quiet, your brain also functions at its optimum levels, which maintains your hormonal and nervous systems balanced. Your hormones and nerve impulses control all your systems and therefore regulate your entire body.
Most common ailments are psychosomatic, meaning that the body’s sickness is caused by mental distress. It’s sufficient to check how many diseases originate from stress, and therefore ever present cortisol and adrenalin hormones in your bloodstream. Such continuous long-term alert mode sabotages all normal functions of the body causing low immunity, heart problems, and metabolism issues, to name but a few.
If you suffer from any health condition, then any form of mindfulness training is very helpful for you to improve your condition, as well as be more conscious when choosing the right path of healing of very complicated medical cases. Also, meditation may help people experience inner peace during their convalescence due to its calming and soothing effect on the psyche.
3. Physical Benefits of Meditation
Mindfulness helps you to be more physically fit. How we think has an impact on how we behave and how our physical body feels. If you want to improve your physical health make meditation part of your life. In the below points we look in detail on numerous benefits of meditation on the physical level.
A. Reduced Body Tension
One of the most obvious meditation benefits for physical health is the reduction of body tension. By focusing your mind and clearing your thoughts you calm down your nervous system. As the mind relaxes, the body follows suit and tension is released.
Physical tension that has built up in your muscles can be released, because they stop being in a state of constant readiness. Meditation help you find a healthy balance between activity and rest.
B. Reduced Pain
In addition to reducing body tension, meditation also reduces pain. Tight muscles become achy and they put excessive pressure on the joints causing pain. Once you let go of chronic tension also the pain goes away.
Additionally, research has shown that meditation helps to alleviate pain by increasing the production of endorphins, which are natural pain relievers produced by your body.
C. Reduced Stress and Anxiety
Meditation calms your mind and body and thus brings down levels of cortisol, the hormone associated with stress and anxiety.
Also during meditation, you learn to be more mindful and relaxed, which help you to be more aware of your thoughts and feelings during the day, enabling you to better manage any stressful situations that may arise in normal life.
D. Regulated Blood Pressure
High blood pressure can lead to a number of serious health problems, from stroke and heart attack to kidney failure. Research on meditation found that it reduces stress hormones and thus promotes relaxation and regulates blood pressure.
Regular meditation practice leads to lower level of stress, it reduces both systolic and diastolic blood pressure, which is beneficial for those with hypertension. Calming your mind and thus nervous system helps your body functions and leads to better blood pressure regulation.
I. Improved Heart Health
Since the meditation reduces body tension, it makes your arteries and veins healthier, improving your blood circulation, and preventing heart attach, or stroke.
Research has found that regularly practiced meditation reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease by helping to lower blood pressure and reduce levels of bad cholesterol.
J. Improved Sleep Quality
Anxious and overactive mind, filled with thoughts and worries is the number one reason why people can’t fall asleep or keep being disturbed and wake up at night. Even when sleeping like this the body is not restful due to excessive dreaming and brain activity.
Any type of meditation that is calming will improve your sleep quality, by allowing you to process and let go of your thoughts and emotions. It’ll help you fall asleep more quickly and stay asleep without waking up with your brain and body fully relaxed.
This can be very beneficial for people who suffer from insomnia to improve their sleep quality by reducing mental disturbances.
K. Improved Immune System Function
Stress has a huge impact on your physical body, leading to weakened immunity and increased vulnerability to illness and infection. By reducing adrenaline and cortisol levels in your blood stream, you bring back the balance to your natural healing responses. Studies have found that meditation can help to increase the number of natural germ-fighting cells.
4. Mental Health Benefits of Meditation
The next great improvement in your self that you will experience from different types of meditation is mental health, sharpness, and overall intellectual capacities improvement. In the points below we look in detail at the meditation produced positive effects on your mind.
A. Increased Focus and Concentration
In today’s world, our minds are constantly bombarded with stimuli and it can be difficult to maintain an unwavering attention span. Studies have shown that you can use meditation to increase your ability to focus and concentrate both on short and long-term basis.
Effects of mindfulness meditation teaches you to stay present and to be focused on the task at hand, rather than letting your thoughts wander. It also helps you to ignore distractions and to stay concentrated for longer time. Also, meditation practice allows your brain to process information better and faster in your day to day life.
B. Improved Mental Clarity
Research suggests that meditation sharpens and clears your mind. From one side, maintaining long spans of concentration during your meditation practice sessions you identify the underlying causes of your mental impediments that cloud your judgement and are able to let them go.
Also, meditation trains you to maintain inner calmness and focus during the normal daily activities, allowing you to think with more reason and make better decisions.
C. Improved Memory Retention
Meditation has been found to improve memory retention and recall, improving your ability to remember information better and faster, retain it for longer periods of time, and have a quicker access to what is stored in your mind. This can be especially beneficial for students who are studying for exams or for those who are trying to improve their memory for work.
D. Improved Cognitive Functions
Studies have shown that meditation can improve cognitive performance in areas such as decision-making, problem-solving, and learning. It can also help to boost your creativity and imagination.
Improved cognitive functions give you ability to think more clearly and process information more accurately. It can also help to reduce your processing times, enabling you to make decisions more quickly and correctly.
E. Increased Self-Awareness
Meditation helps to increase self-awareness, allowing you to become more in tune with your thoughts, feelings, and emotions. This can help you to better understand yourself as well as others.
Observing your thoughts and feelings without judgement makes you more conscious of human mind thought processes and typical reactions to different situations. You can also become more aware of your emotions and your relation to them, enabling you to better regulate your behaviors.
F. Increase in Creativity
Meditation reduces stress and permits you to explore more deeply the different aspects of your mind, increasing your creativity and imagination. This can help you to think outside the box and come up with innovative ways out of problems.
It has been found that by calming your mind, you become more joyful and open to new experiences, giving you more insights into new ideas and solutions. By going within you become more connected to the outer world as well due to the fact that your inner and outer “eyes open wider”.
5. Emotional Health Benefits of Meditation
Your emotional well-being is very much related to your physical and mental health. Calming and tuning your body and mind, you also experience more positive, productive, and healthy emotions. In the points below we look in detail how meditation can also heal you emotionally, making you feel better about yourself, about your life, and the people and world around you.
A. Improved Awareness of your Emotions
Awareness of your emotions can be difficult, especially if you are used to suppressing or ignoring them. But meditation can help you to again connect with them, accept, and even embrace them.
This helps you to better understand yourself and how your emotions affect you, your behaviors, your relations, and your life. When you become more mindful of your emotional reactions you can learn to better manage them. This self-awareness is the key to purify your emotional body you realize the good things in life and start to feel like you flow through life with ease rather than battle.
B. Improved Mood and Increased Feeling of Joy
Meditation has been linked to increased sense of peace, contentment, and joy, and thus reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety. When you are aware and relaxed you are emotionally more stable and cope with with life situations with more ease, calm, and lightness.
Self-awareness cultivated through meditation in fact gives you ability to not take what people say or what happens around you so seriously and heavily. You become more light-spirited, get better sense of humor, notice more funny details about life rather than seeing everything in grey and dark colors.
C. Increased Self-Confidence
Meditation practice makes you more mindful of your inner self and aware of your strengths as well as weaknesses in a healthy and accepting manner. Self-confidence is all about striking a balance without going into extremes.
When you know yourself you start feeling more comfortable in your own skin and thus you know what to expect from your capacities and behavior. This gives you a greater sense of confidence, that inner calm feeling that you know how to deal with things calmly and in a good way.
D. Improved Cognitive Flexibility
Cognitive flexibility is an emergent capacity to change the way of your thinking and adjust your behavior in response to a changing environment in a productive and effective manner. The key to it is in your mental clarity and focus which you gain from mindful meditation.
When you are centered in yourself and calm, your overall functioning is improved and you have flexibility to switch between multiple concepts at the same time to chose the best mode of action.
E. Better Relationships with Others
Meditation foster better relationships with others, as when you are more in tune with yourself, you also become more understanding, empathetic, and compassionate towards others. This leads you to better communication, conflict resolution, and overall happier relationships.
6. Spiritual Benefits of Meditation
Amongst many types of meditation, especially the transcendental meditation produces escalating inner realizations and progress towards the evolution of the Self. After a few months of meditation practiced minimum for one hour twice a day you start to experience profound transformation of your consciousness. In the points below we look in detail at how not only you gain health and well-being but also spiritually benefit from the regular and extended practice.
Increased Sense of Inner Peace
Any method of meditation can be considered spiritual meditation if it increases the sense of your inner peace. Loving-kindness meditation makes you cultivate a sense of inner calm, because it reduces negative emotions towards yourself, others, and the things that happen.
One of the most important of such meditation components is acceptance and it is the key factor to experiencing lasting feeling of peace in your life.
When you meditate, you are able to quiet your mind and find a deep calm within. You take a step back from your thoughts and observe them without judgement. This leads to not only a greater sense of inner peace but also an overall feeling of contentment.
Improved Internal Clarity
This inner peace is accompanied by an improved internal clarity; a clarity that can help you make better decisions and judgments. Such mental state is also essential when navigating through difficult circumstances, as it enables you to see outside of your own personal biases and look at the bigger picture.
Mindful meditation practices makes you more aware of your innermost thoughts and feelings, which provides you with greater clarity insight into your life. This gives you a clearer and deeper understanding of yourselves and your life, allowing you to make more conscious decisions.
Improved Connection with Self
By meditating, you are allowing yourself to be more aware of your feelings, thoughts, and emotions. This can help to bring more understanding and clarity to the issues that are important to you, and thus brings more understanding, love, and connection to yourself.
Increased Compassion and Connection with Others
Since meditation and relaxation makes you dive into your inner world, and thus become better able to understand and empathize with the struggles of those around us. It increases your compassion and empathy for others.
When you switch off alert-mode, calm down, and observe the flow of life without reaction you possess the capacity of seeing the world from another person’s perspective. This helps you to establish deeper connections with people without expectations or judgments. As you are deeper into a spiritual practice you will be even able to reach out and help those around you without losing your inner peace and contentment. You focus on the right action but maintain inner stability even if outside there is disturbance.
Increased Sense of Purpose
As you become more aware of your thought patterns, you realize your values and beliefs, which gives you a clearer sense of what you really want out of life or what is your true purpose here on earth. This increases your motivation and drive to pursue your goals and make a positive impact in the world.
It has been shown that meditation reduces all negative traits and establish more positive attitude towards life and people. Thus you become more aware of your place in the world and better equipped to take on your roles to fulfil yourself as well as serve others with highest morals and principles coming naturally from within as a loving urge.
7. Conclusion
Effectiveness of meditation has been experienced by millions of people since thousands of years and till today is a preferred kind of practice by many. With its proven benefits, it’s no wonder this practice has become increasingly popular over the years. Both yoga and meditation are willingly integrated into the daily routines by so many people, due to their life-changing effects.
Mindfulness and meditation can be carried out into your normal living, even when you walk, talk, or do something at home or at work you can continue your practice of being aware and not-reacting negatively or compulsively.
Meditation can also become your most powerful tool for maintaining your physical, mental, and emotional health as well as help you grow personally, aim your goals and satisfaction in life. Here below in the bonus section you can learn how to start your meditation today and start reaping its amazing positive benefits.
BONUS SECTION
8. Tips for Starting Your Meditation Practice
If you want to reduce stress, improve your health and enhance personal growth, you can follow these 6 simple tips, to develop a successful meditation practice that will have a significant positive impact on your life.
I. Set Goals
When beginning to practice meditation, it’s important that you set goals to deeply know why you are embarking upon the meditation journey. Is it to achieve better health? Is it to train your mind to be more focused, productive, and effective at work? is it to be more calm and sensitive in your relations?
Write down your personal goals and revisit your notes whenever you need a motivation boost.
II. Start with Short Sessions
To start, you could meditate for 5 minutes twice a day. As you get used to it you can make it 10 minutes twice a day. And you become comfortable with that, you increase the length of your meditation sessions farther to 30 or 60 minutes.
It is crucial not to force yourself into long meditation right from the start. Your mind and body need time to adjust to the practice. Imposed discipline is counterproductive. Anything that you push hard you are prone to dislike.
Starting from 5 minutes twice a day for the first 5 days is pleasant and relaxing, your mind and body will enjoy it. Then you can proceed to 10 minutes for the next 10 days and to 20 minutes for the next 20 days.
Anything that feels natural to you is a good speed for increasing the times of your meditation sessions.
On the second month of your meditation experience, you can do 30 minutes twice a day and you can stay with that if you already see a noticeable improvement in your life quality. You can increase it to 60 minutes on your 3rd month of practice if you desire to go deeper into meditation.
Remember even 5 minutes twice a day of meditation will improve your concentration, health and overall sense of well-being in life.
III. Create a Routine
To maximize the benefits of your practice you need to develop a daily routine. Creating a schedule ensures that you make time for it. Consider the time early in the morning after you wake up and in the evening before you go to sleep. This is when you are naturally the most relaxed, calm, and quiet, which is very conducive to successful practice of meditation.
IV. Select a Peaceful Place
Once you’ve created your routine, it’s important to find a peaceful place to meditate. This might be in your home or even outside in nature. Don’t be too picky about complete silence if you live in the city. In fact there are meditation types that train your mind to ignore all the outside stimuli of sounds improving your capacity to go within and focus.
Once you selected the place try to always do your practice in there. Of course if your travel or are outside for some reason its perfectly fine to meditate wherever you are. Maintaining the place for the repeated activity is simply more helpful to go deeper and faster.
V. Use Anatomically Correct Posture
It’s essential to keep your spine erect with your shoulders down and neck long and relaxed. Tilting your trunk to any side or collapsing your chest changes your hormones and your brain wave patterns. To go into meditation state of your consciousness your need to keep your back straight and chest open.
If you are flexible you can sit on the floor, however if you feel discomfort or pain in your ankles, knees, or hips, you must ensure to use enough height under your buttocks, or even use the chair to prevent possibility of injury or discomfort.
VI. Meditation Technique
If you haven’t done any meditation training you still can start your practice now.
Mindfulness meditation is one of the most popular forms of meditation and is a simple, yet powerful method. There are several components to it, including focusing on your breath, learning to observe your thoughts without judgment, and paying attention to the present moment.
In ancient traditions of meditation like Buddhist Vipassana or Zen, word mindfulness wasn’t used, but the exact same teachings were applied. Anapanasati in Buddhist tradition is breath awareness meditation. It’s extremely powerful, because your breath continuously flows and teaches you a lesson about transient nature of life.
Everything is arising and passing, just like your breath is coming in and going out. By observing that process consciously, you learn to accept the reality as it is. This makes you experience sense of peace and the feeling of flowing together with the current of life (rather than against it and struggle).
Meditation for Specific Mental Conditions
If you have more serious mental health conditions it’s recommended to do a more dynamic type of mediation with eyes open. Inward going forms of meditation may trigger a different state of mind and if your psychological state is not very stable at the moment it’s good to do more grounding practices where you use your body more and spend more time in nature.
Regular meditation may help psychotic conditions but guided meditation by an experienced teacher is suggested if you need meditation therapies. There are many meditation centers where you can consult what kind of practice would be suitable for you. You can also consult with your health care provider about the possible benefits of meditation for your mind condition.
Disclaimer
Beata Yoga Dhyan teachings are not intended to be a substitute for medical diagnosis, medication, or treatment. Seek the advice of your physician or health provider with any questions you may have regarding your health symptom or medical condition. Never disregard medical advice or delay in seeking medical advice because of something you have read on Beata Yoga Dhyan.