The Whys & Hows of Meditation

Have you ever wondered why you should meditate? Or how meditation can help improve your life? I know I did. When I first started, I had so many questions and pretty much zero answers. So I did some digging. And I’m here to share what I learned with you.

The “why” of meditation is not so difficult to understand, but the “how” turns out to be surprisingly tricky. Science has been studying meditation for decades now, and it has been a long time since researchers thought they were just looking at relaxation techniques. Yet every year brings new discoveries about how meditation works—and new questions about what its benefits really are.

The most striking thing science has discovered is that meditation appears to make permanent changes in the brain. Long-term meditators have larger amounts of gyrification (“folding” of the cortex, which may allow the brain to process information faster) and thicker gray matter in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. As a result, they take fewer steps to perform everyday actions, and their attention is more sharply focused. They recover from negative emotions faster and feel more empathy for others’ suffering. And those are just the results from one recent study; as researchers learn more about how meditation works, we should expect to hear about more benefits. They have also turned up some interesting correlations that might or might not be causal: For example, people who meditate appear to show different activity in their brains when they experience physical pain than non-meditators do.

To practice meditation, you need two things: motivation and discipline. If you want to get started with meditation, what you need is to develop both of these qualities. The first step towards building motivation is to recognize that meditation works. The second step is to keep in mind that motivation without discipline equals fantasy. If you’re not willing to set aside time every day, then don’t bother starting; nothing will come of it.

The key to meditation is that it is not trying to achieve a particular state of mind. It’s just observing what’s happening as it happens. No matter what arises, no matter how much it may seem like an emergency, you just watch it happen and then let it go. You know that this too shall pass. If you don’t yet know how to do this, start with a few sessions of watching your breath. The breath is always there and always changing: coming in, going out, sometimes fast, sometimes slow.

The following are some tips on how you can make meditation more enjoyable and easier to do every day:

1. Find a comfortable position for yourself so that you will not be distracted by the pain in your body while meditating.

2. Close your eyes gently so that you will not be distracted by visual images or light entering your eyes while meditating.

3. Keep your spine straight so that you will not be distracted by the pain in your back while meditating.

4. Focus your awareness on the flow of air into and out of your nose while breathing normally through your nose while meditating.

5. Breathe calmly and peacefully so that you will not be distracted by pain or discomfort in your body while meditating.

The human mind is an amazing thing – but sometimes we can use a little help to calm it down and focus on the present moment. Meditation helps us to do this by teaching us to observe our thoughts as they pass through our consciousness, without judging them as good or bad. When we develop this ability, we gain more control over our minds and emotions, and we feel less stressed and more at peace with ourselves and those around us.