Why Meditate?
“To meditate means to come home to yourself.
Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
Meditation… what is it?
Believed to have stemmed from the Vedic period in ancient India (c.10,000BC), meditation is the practice of stilling the mind by effortlessly focusing on one point for an extended period of time.
It begins with strengthening your ability to pay attention.
You could be: sitting down continually repeating your name; walking focusing on placing one foot in front of the other; paying attention to your breath; feeling the sensations of the inhalation and exhalation as you draw breath in and out.
The practice is to repeatedly bring your mind back to the point of focus when it wanders. And to be clear, your mind will wander and get distracted!
But HOW can meditation help me?
It’s has been proclaimed in many cultures as a gateway to better overall health and well being. Today’s scientists mostly verify this and also see how it helps shape a happier, longer life.
A regular meditation practice (note “regular”) in increasingly recommended by medical professions for people suffering from: stress, anxiety, depression, chronic pain, physical tensions, sleep disorders, the list goes on.
It is also seen as a key tool for leaders in business as well as managers and employees.
Leaders in large organisations such as Apple, Yahoo, Twitter, Procter & Gamble, Goldman Sachs to name but a few, claim regular meditation to be a key factor for successful leadership:
The main business case for meditation is that if you’re fully present on the job, you will be more effective as a leader, you will make better decisions and you will work better with other people.
WILLIAM GEORGE, Board Member, Goldman Sachs
While the benefits…are important no matter where you are in the company organization chart, it’s especially vital for the hard-charging managers and leaders.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, President and Editor-in-chief, Huffington Post Media
Meditation breaks me away from the digital world and brings me in to the physical world.
PADMASREE WARRIOR, President and CEO and of Fable Group Inc
Neuroscience acknowledges it makes you feel better, physically, emotionally and mentally. It also helps you connect better with others. Through the process of neuroplasticity, regular meditation can actually change the shape of your brain. This allows you to retrain your mind with new more helpful behaviours and improve learning ability, memory and overall feelings of contentment.
So HOW does meditation work?
Here are a few of my pickings for you to browse through:
This article from Psychology Today from 2015 gives a well balanced (and not too technical) explanation as to what occurs in the brain when we meditate and why it can help people feel happier, healthier, joyful.
I like this piece Your Brain on Meditation which was written in 2010 and for gives a good overview of some of the fascinating things that happen to your brain as a result of a regular meditation practice.
I also like: this article as it gives a helpful overview on meditation and how the brain can change its unhelpful mind patterns in favour of new ones, due to meditation. It has some good juicy info to sink your teeth into.
Finally this article written in 2020 by Sheila Ohlsson Walker, Ph.D., is a more current piece to read.
What are the benefits…?
I’ve listed a few here for you with some science backup.
Better Focus
New research shows that meditation can help you improve your ability to concentrate in two ways. First, it can make you better at focusing on something specific while ignoring distractions. Second, it can make you more capable of noticing what is happening around you, giving you a fuller perspective on the present moment. The more you practice focusing your attention, the more steadiness you create in your mind. By giving full attention to one thing at a time, you can learn to direct your attention and energy where you choose, as opposed to where your untamed mind pulls you to. As they say, where your mind goes, energy flows.
Less Anxiety, Chronic Stress and Pain
This point is technical, but interesting. The more we meditate, the less anxiety, pain and stress we have, and it turns out this is because we’re actually loosening the connections of particular neural pathways.
There’s a section of our brains that’s sometimes called the Me Center (it’s technically the medial prefrontal cortex). This is the part that processes information relating to ourselves and our experiences. Normally the neural pathways from the bodily sensation and fear centers of the brain to the Me Center are really strong. When you experience a scary or upsetting sensation, it triggers a strong reaction in your Me Center, making you feel scared and under attack.
When we meditate, we weaken this neural connection. This means that we don’t react as strongly to sensations that might have once lit up our Me Centers. As we weaken this connection, we simultaneously strengthen the connection between what’s known as our Assessment Center (the part of our brains known for reasoning) and our bodily sensation and fear centers. So when we experience scary or upsetting sensations, we can more easily look at them rationally.
More Creativity
Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands studied both focused-attention and open-monitoring mediation to see if there was any improvement in creativity afterwards. They found that people who practiced focused-attention meditation did not show any obvious signs of improvement in the creativity task following their meditation. For those who did open-monitoring meditation, however, they performed better on a task that asked them to come up with new ideas.
More Kindness and Compassion
Research on meditation has shown that empathy and compassion are higher in those who practice meditation regularly. One experiment showed participants images of other people that were either good, bad or neutral in what they called “compassion meditation.” The participants were able to focus their attention and reduce their emotional reactions to these images, even when they weren’t in a meditative state. They also experienced more compassion for others when shown disturbing images.
Part of this comes from activity in the amygdala—the part of the brain that processes emotional stimuli. During meditation, this part of the brain normally shows decreased activity, but in this experiment it was exceptionally responsive when participants were shown images of people.
Another study in 2008 found that people who meditated regularly had stronger activation levels in their temporal parietal junctures (a part of the brain tied to empathy) when they heard the sounds of people suffering, than those who didn’t meditate.
Less Stress
Mindful meditation has been shown to help people perform under pressure while feeling less stressed. A 2012 study split a group of human resources managers into three, with one third participating in mindful meditation training, another third taking body relaxation training and the last third given no training at all. A stressful multitasking test was given to all the managers before and after the eight-week experiment. In the final test, the group that had participated in the meditation training reported less stress during the test than both of the other groups.
More Gray Matter
Meditation has been linked to larger amounts of gray matter in the hippocampus and frontal areas of the brain.
What does more grey matter mean?
It can lead to more positive emotions, longer-lasting emotional stability, and heightened focus during daily life. Meditation has also been shown to diminish age-related effects on gray matter and reduce the decline of our cognitive functioning.
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Private sessions
In need of some guidance and help getting started? Looking for some simple techniques you can incorporate in to your daily routine? A one to one session can help you tremendously. I help tailor meditation practices for busy, people like you who know it’s important to stay focused, clear and centred in order to successfully lead others at home and work.
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Like all things today of course there’s an app!
Headspace is one of my top recommendations.
Start your practice
Find a quiet space (I recommend using earplugs and eye masks if needed) and sit comfortably, preferably with your back straight.
Start early — first thing in the morning means your mind is less cluttered and reduces the odds that the day gets away from you.
Same time, same place. Make it a routine, form a habit, fortify those neural connections. Your will benefit from the regularity and your brain will adapt better each time.
Include a family member or Zoom a friend. Did you know that group meditation can promote a sense of human connection, boost oxytocin (the “love hormone”), and there may be quantum-level benefits, too.