There is a lot of misunderstanding about meditation that causes many people to give up easily at first. First of all, I think we need to be clear about what it is we expect to feel when we meditate. It’s not a magical event that will take place suddenly and quickly. The way we meditate can be influenced by such factors as age, culture and style. The last one is important as it is really what you are more comfortable with. For example, some people don’t know how to pray because either they do not believe in prayers or have never prayed in their lives. A fifteen or sixteen year old will jump and move to the rhythm of a hip hop song but find it difficult to sit peacefully in a lotus posture and listen to the harmonic vibration of a sitar instrument in the background. Now in terms of what to expect it can be an amorphous feeling of pure ecstasy, joy, peace, calmness or love. Or it can be the union of ourselves with the subject of our focus, e.g. our union with a higher being or plane of intelligence. The benefits of meditation are listed as follows: • Decreased stress • Reduced symptoms of depression, anxiety disorders, pain and insomnia • Enhanced ability to pay attention • Increased quality of life Neuroscientist Dr. Sara Lazar explains in this video how meditation can affect changes in certain areas of the brain such as the Left Hippocampus which assists our learning, memory and emotion regulation, the Temporal Parietal Junction which enables us to develop perspectives (or out of body experience), empathy and compassion, and the Amygdala which is involved in processing our fears, anger and pleasure. The reason for all these changes she says is caused by repeated behavior and the fact that the brain is plastic in its response, what they refer to as neuroplasticity in scientific jargon. The frontal part of the brain tends to shrink as we grow older but in one of the experiments conducted on people who were at the age of 50 and mediated regularly the size of the frontal part of their brain was observed to be the same as that of a 25 year old youth.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 16:31:04 +0000
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