For many of us, this pandemic has produced myriad fears and worries about the health and well-being of ourselves and everyone around us. In this context, my recent blogs have explored ways to cope with emotional eating, help protect your immune system, and minimize the anxiety, stress, and grief many are experiencing.
This month, I want to share with you one of the most powerful ways for quieting your mind and body, and managing the negative thoughts that may keep popping up. By practicing meditation, you can learn to clear your mind, relax your body, and find calm and stability in the face of uncertainty.
What Exactly is Meditation?
Meditation is a contemplative practice, engaged in across various religious and spiritual traditions as a means of quieting, focusing, and transforming the mind. Meditation cultivates self-awareness, and provides the optimum conditions for practicing the skill of mindfulness.
Generally, the goal of meditation is to intensify personal and spiritual growth, in addition to calming the mind and body.
With a regular meditation practice, you can attain a focused, centered inner state that is separated from the noise, interruptions, and worries of the outside world. At the same time, meditation can actually improve your overall health.
How Meditation Enhances Your Health
Meditation enhances your health by:
Decreasing pain;
Increasing immune function;
Reducing risk of heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and premature death;
Reducing cellular inflammation;
Enhancing happiness, and lessening anxiety and stress; and
Reducing emotional eating and other addictive behaviors.
Beyond these very clear health benefits, meditation can improve our decision-making, focus, and information processing, resilience, and emotional intelligence. It does this by changing the actual structure of our brains. In response to stimuli, the cells and neurons in our brains are constantly making new connections and disrupting old ones. This process, called neuroplasticity, allows our brains to change depending on what is stimulating them. The practice of meditation increases our brains’ grey matter and volume in the areas related to emotion regulation, focus, introspection, and self-control.
Tips for Getting Started
Have a meditation spot. Designate a space in your home for your practice. This will help you ease into the practice more quickly and with more regularity. It can be any quiet space where you’ll be comfortable and won’t be disturbed.
Sit for just two minutes. If finding the time is a challenge, start with a commitment of two minutes a day for a week. If that goes well, consider increasing by another two minutes each day, and do that for another week. By increasing your practice a little at a time, you’ll be meditating for 15 minutes or more within two weeks.
Follow a guided meditation. Guided meditations can be very helpful for getting started. During a guided meditation, a trained practitioner provides verbal instruction, often accompanied by music, to talk you through the practice. There are hundreds of free meditations on YouTube with lengths from two minutes to 30 minutes or more.
Don’t worry about doing it “right” — just do it. Find a comfortable, seated position in your designated meditation place. There’s no perfect way to meditate, so just commend yourself for giving it a try!
Don’t worry about clearing your mind. Many people think the goal of meditation is to clear your mind or stop all thoughts. It’s not. Thoughts will enter your mind; that’s normal. Acknowledge them, then refocus your attention on the rhythm of your breathing. As you practice, this will become second nature.
Stay with whatever arises. We tend to want to avoid feelings such as frustration, anger, and anxiety. However, an amazingly useful exercise in a meditation practice is to stay with the feeling for awhile. Just pay attention to it and be curious.
Find a community. Some people will do better with others. If that’s you, find a community of people who are meditating and join them. This might be a Zen or Tibetan community near you or an online group, where you can check in, ask questions, and get support.
I so hope you’ll give meditation a try. I’ve found it to be a very soothing, healing, and life-enhancing experience. And best of all, there’s no fee required!!