What a mystery to me that so many humans don’t meditate. If people knew how much difference it could make to their everyday physical, mental, emotional and spiritual lives the world might be a different place. The value of giving the mind a small daily break from all the thinking, worrying, planning and doing is tremendous.
Not taking this time out is like never brushing your teeth; like staying up all night; like wearing the same socks for weeks. The mind needs a reset! In my opinion, a simple meditation practice deserves its place among essential upkeep items for the human being.
As the Zen saying goes, you should sit in meditation for twenty minutes a day, unless you’re too busy. Then you should sit for an hour 🙂
The origins of meditation are mysterious, hidden in deep time. We can imagine our hunter-gatherer forebears moving out farther from the equator and experiencing long dark winter nights. Not needing twelve hours of sleep, they must have spent hours each night in wakeful silence. Perhaps this was when humans found an opportunity to explore the inner landscape.
What we know is that by the fifth century BC many forms of meditative practice could be found in Hindu and Buddhist India, Taoist China, and later in other regions including the Middle East and its faiths. Something about these practices must have felt like a positive influence for individuals within all these cultures. Putting aside the particulars of the various forms, including all the colorful personalities and religious aspects, we find a common core:
Meditation means purposefully focusing the mind. It’s that simple. The meditator develops the ability to gently bring focus to just one thing, whether a word or an image or a process like one’s breathing, and this over time leads the myriad activities of mind back to their origin in a point of stillness.
The various schools have offered hundreds of specific things to focus on… deities, truths, symbols, phrases, beads, God… a corpse… our waking life moment by moment. But the specific object of focus is quite secondary to the main point. The central truth of meditation is that developing the ability to hold one thing in steady awareness, and gently and repeatedly bring this focus back when lost, mysteriously opens new worlds to human experience.
Even the beginning stages of this seemingly simple practice have been shown (in thousands of studies by now) to produce a whole range of benefits in life. Incredible!
Consider the nervous system. Our complex brain modulates our body, thoughts, feelings and actions as associated hormones and neurochemicals rise and fall in different states of being. Meditation has been shown to normalize and optimize many of these chemicals, pointing toward greater harmony and coherence and a state of relaxed alertness.
Levels of dopamine (neurotransmitter of pleasure), serotonin (neurotransmitter of happiness), and GABA (neurotransmitter of calm) all tend to increase in response to meditation. Melatonin also rises to help with sleep. At the same time, stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and norepinephrine are found at lower levels in meditators.
Experiencing less stress and anxiety and more even-keeled moods are wonderful in themselves, making life and relationships more pleasant. Of course, these same changes are also beneficial in regard to stress-related illnesses. Thus meditation has been shown to have powerful healing and preventative influences on so many cardiovascular, infectious, immune and neurological conditions as well as anxiety-related mental disorders.
The initial draw to meditation may often be the promise of these kinds of health benefits. Ongoing practice, though, can open up a range of additional quality of life transformations as well:
Longer-term meditators can experience increased empathy and compassion, leading to richer, more loving relationships. The meditator also gains insights into oneself over time, enabling psychological self-evolution. It becomes easier for compulsions and addictions to drop away. Meditators can also experience increased flexibility and resilience in coping with challenging situations.
And then there’s the possibility of a miracle waiting at the very center of a meditation practice… when simple sustained attention becomes a path to deep experiential understanding of all life and the cosmos.
When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a candle in a windless place.
Bhagavad Gita c. 300BC
Meditation has a proven record by now as a powerful multi-level antidote to the kinds of stresses we humans experience in the twenty-first century. It’s entirely possible that our big brain makes it too easy to think too much, and technology often amplifies this tendency. Meditation is key to giving the mind a break, quieting the endless chatter and allowing our awareness to settle into something deeper. Evidence suggests that this kind of inner rest and rejuvenation can be transformative for individuals and their quality of participation in our world.
Here are links to a couple of 2024 articles. This one explores further how meditating can change your brain. Then there’s a new comprehensive study, the first of its kind, on emergent phenomena (EP) or paranormal experiences often associated with longer term meditation. These are found to be more prevalent than supposed, occurring quite regularly in meditators and the general population alike. The study finds that these experiences are usually described as positive in nature but not always, and that many are quite accurately portrayed in ancient meditation texts. The study concludes that the medical establishment needs to do more to recognize and understand these powerful transformative experiences.
For an everyman-mystic account of a deep meditation experience, try this post on Quora. In covering a lot of ground in few words the author echoes insights and perceptions from mystics throughout the centuries.
Miracle Soup 