“The body benefits from movement and the mind benefits from stillness. “
~ Sakyong Mipham
So, as you’ll start to read my blogs you will come to the conclusion that I am not only a very spiritual and health-obsessed girl, but I am also a big nerd in disguise!
Throughout my Undergraduate years (and still currently in my Postgraduate studies) my go-to places for quality information in any topic that I have to do research in are journal articles. Therefore, instead of telling you from my own experience what benefits meditation brought into my life, I’ve found this amazing article called ‘The Spiritual Benefits of Meditation’ by Phra Nicholas Thanissaro from The University of Warwick, which will surely put your mind to ease when asking yourself ‘Why should I start meditating?’
To put it simply, I’ve divided this blog into 4 categories regarding the benefits of meditation for:
- Brain benefits
- Clinical benefits
- Personality benefits
- Social benefits
Let’s get down to science-stuff should we?
Benefits of meditation for the brain
By meditating, it has been proven that the brain experiences several changes which helped along time to exploit the phenomenon of neuroplasticity.
For example, negative experiences and painful sufferings in life get stored incredibly quickly in the hippocampus, which in turn cause our ‘flight or fight’ responses to certain situations.
Through meditation, our rational capability to regulate our emotional functioning can be trained to control our emotions, representing a massive aid in offsetting depression, which usually would require coaching, psychotherapy or medication (worst case scenario which, unfortunately, has been adopted by an increasingly large part of the population due to people’s everyday stress).
Meditation is associated with increasing our grey matter concentration in the regions of the brain involved in daily activities such as memory, emotion regulation and learning.
Putting it simply? Imagine this scenario.
You buy a really nice pizza from Dominoes. You spill it on the floor because you’re walking too fast to get to your class. This will, therefore, cause you an extreme reaction such as anger. These extreme reactions have a worst impact on our wellbeing than the circumstances themselves, and here is where meditation comes to act, by making you a person less susceptible to these secondary harmful scenarios.
Clinical benefits of meditation
Meditation is a revolutionizing help in overcoming stress, anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, sleep disorders and numerous other health issues.
Also, if practised regularly, meditation can help in preventing coronary heart diseases, infarction and in reducing the frequency and severity of migraine attacks.
Benefits of meditation for the personality
From my own experience (and backed up by this research), I can defiantly agree that meditation massively improves our happiness, self-esteem, empathy, creativity, spirituality and it gives us a positive affect upon life, whilst enhancing our learning abilities.
It also supports you in becoming more patient, more settled and satisfied with your daily activities and responsibilities, and it makes you more accepting of the things beyond your control.
Meditation helps you in becoming the best version of yourself.
The longer you meditate, the more you will come to perceive yourself as being increasingly similar to your ideal and social-self.
Social benefits of meditation
The idea from a social point of view is pretty simple. The more people learn to meditate and live peacefully, the more our societal and world issues will be diminished.
Meditation makes you more positive in your outlook on human nature and more sociable, therefore, it increases your ability to live a happier life, first with yourself and then with the people surrounding you.
Now, you’ve got the gist. What do I do next you may wonder?
Next, you act. Act from a place of love. A place of grounded intention and desire of becoming the best version of yourself. Do it for yourself and then, you will be doing it naturally for the world.
What I found very difficult at the beginning of my Spiritual Journey was to find a guided meditation that suited with the moment I was in my life at that point, my beliefs, my inner peace and my tranquillity – which by the way, were worst than a MONKEY JUMPING FROM TREE TO TREE.
In my next blogs under ‘Soul Food’, I’ve created a list with Meditations that have progressively helped me to get my mind in a meditative state, step by step and in chronological order, for you to understand and see that the journey of Meditation is long and the opposite of easy!
You start small, 3-5 minutes per day, you succeed, you fail, you keep doing it, keep focusing, keep breathing deep and keep believing in yourself.
Learning and putting knowledge in practice has never been easy. Especially when it comes to our Spiritual Journey.
So, don’t worry, we all go through the same process. Together. As one.
Sending you Love & Light,
Laura 🙏
Check out the Full Journal Article here .
