You may well know that meditation is a wonderful practice that’s good for you, but are you aware of the many benefits it has to offer you?
In this video presentation, I share with you the countless benefits of meditation, plus some additional ones you might not have even heard of or considered. This simple practice can enhance every area of your life, from relationships to emotional health and even the shape of your physical body.
Meditation does so much more than merely helping you feel calm and relaxed. It can help promote relaxation, improve your resilience to stress and help you cope with traumatic events like PTSD in a healthier way.
In this article we will be looking at the extraordinary benefits meditation offers, so that you can fully understand its incredible power.
Before we begin, it’s important to understand that meditation is a complementary therapy, and not meant as a replacement for medical care. It’s always good to seek professional medical advice when you feel it’s appropriate so use your best judgment when it comes to your health and well-being.
Meditation is a beautiful practice that can change your life. It has significant benefits that go way beyond helping you feel calm and relaxed.
Meditation can help you self regulate your body, your breath, and even your emotions if you are feeling anxious or distressed.
When you meditate, you learn how to regulate your own body. As you breathe deeply, you activate something known as the relaxation response, which has many health benefits such as help you eliminate toxins, rest and digest. Essentially, it helps you return to balance, also known as homeostasis.
Engaging in a regular meditation practice can also help with many health issues. Meditation can help you:
- Improve your mood.
- Cultivate a sense of positivity and calm.
- Reduce stress and anxiety.
- With substance abuse, like alcohol and drugs.
- Improve your overall well-being.
- Feel healthier and happier.
- Reduce pain and inflammation.
- Improve your sleep.
- Lower blood pressure.
- Decrease cortisol, the stress hormone.
- Lose weight.
- Slow down the aging process.
- Feel more youthful and radiant.
- Boost your immunity.
- Improve your mental state.
- Make better decisions and remain clear and focused.
- Stay present in the moment.
- Improve your memory.
- Increase grey matter in the brain.
- Boost your energy.
As you can see, there are some amazing benefits to a regular meditation practice far beyond helping you achieve a state of relaxation and peace.
Meditation helps you breathe
When you focus on your breath and pay attention to the way you are breathing your breathing softens.
As you breathe deeply, your belly opens and your lungs expand. What you are really doing is engaging the parasympathetic nervous system, which prompts that relaxation response.
The relaxation response allows you to disengage from fight-or-flight. When your mind is fast and busy, you tend to breathe shallow and quick. Once you start slowing down your breathing through meditation, it sends a signal to your brain to also slow down.
It helps you let go and relax. As you slow down your breathing, you also slow down your mind. All of this helps you raise your self-awareness and regulate your own inner-state.
Meditation helps promote emotional health
The more you meditate, the more you get in touch with and aware of your feelings and emotions, as well as your mental state.
The practice of meditation helps improve your emotional health and it can also help improve your emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is that ability you have to identify and manage your own emotions as well as the emotions of others.
The more you get in touch with your emotions and how you feel, the more you’ll know how to skillfully express your emotions in a healthy manner. If you don’t express your emotions and hold them in, or continue to deny your true emotions, you’ll end up pushing those unhealthy feelings down.
Repressing your emotions can also cause a great deal of anxiety and tension, which can lead to depression. When you are depressed, your emotions don’t flow as well, and as a result, the emotions get stuck.
If you continue to repress your emotions you will continue to feel bad. Denying your emotions and pushing them down by engaging in too much social media, work addictions or any other addictions, doesn’t do anything to promote your emotional health.
The more you face your emotions and express them the more centered and balanced you will feel.
Dealing with your emotions in a healthy manner helps improve your mood and cultivate a sense of positivity and calm.
This is also why it feels good to cry after a stressful event because this is a form of emotional release.
Meditation helps you sleep better
Meditation can also help you sleep much more peacefully. It not only helps decrease pain and inflammation, but can also help you wind down at night.
If you go to bed with all of that stress and angst, you don’t give your mind and body a chance to disengage. If you continually jump out of bed and immediately start your day and collapse in bed after running around all day, your body won’t be able to rest.
It’s really important to learn how to slow down at night and give your mind a chance to rest. By disengaging from social media and other distractions like too much television, you can give your mind a chance to calm down.
Meditation boosts your health and improves your metabolism
Your body produces cortisol, the stress hormone when you get stressed and anxious. This keeps you locked into a continual state of fight or flight.
Too much cortisol can even decrease your metabolism, and keep you from maintaining a healthy weight. Meditation helps reduce that cortisol, thus it helps you maintain a healthy weight.
Stress also tends to age us, so engaging in a regular meditation practice helps you manage that stress, and as a result, stay youthful and radiant. Meditation also helps boost your immunity, which can help protect you from diseases and viruses.
Meditation helps to clear your mind and choose positive thoughts
It has been said that we have up to 90,000 thoughts a day! That’s a lot of thoughts. If you really stop to think about that, you would probably see that many of these thoughts are the same. We tend to repeat things over and our in our minds.
Continually repeating a negative or self-defeating thought certainly doesn’t help you live a peaceful healthy life.
Meditation helps you have a greater awareness of that stream of consciousness that’s always flowing through your mind.
The more aware you are of those thoughts, the more power you have to shift your consciousness and focus on the positive.
Meditation can also help increase those neural pathways in the brain, helping you with memory and learning. The more you open those neural pathways up, the more malleable and plastic your brain is, which can help you take in new information and receive new information more quickly.
As you meditate, you also raise your vibration and improve your energy, which helps you flow through life instead of constantly struggling. The more you meditate, the more positive you will feel.
Meditation improves your relationships
Did you know that meditation could also help you improve your relationships? Meditation can help you communicate better and listen better. It can also help increase bonding, help you connect better and help enhance that sense of intimacy.
As humans we crave connection. We want healthy relationships that thrive. The more we meditate and center our energy, the more love we can offer someone else.
Meditation also helps you connect with your spirit and tap into that sense of kindness and compassion for others. Compassion is a very powerful state of consciousness and meditation can help you develop it. The more compassionate you feel toward yourself the more compassion you can offer others, and it makes your world a much better place to live.
Instead of constantly feeling aggravated or annoyed, you can feel more heart-centered and peaceful. You can see things from a higher perspective. You can raise your consciousness and truly discover that inner freedom that you crave.
Meditation also helps you tap into that state of flow. This might also be thought of as being in the zone.
When you live in that state of flow, you connect better with others and tap into a greater sense of creativity and consciousness. This can help improve innovation and productivity as you learn to think outside the box.
Meditation can also help you experience synchronicity. Once you start tapping into that sense of oneness and that flow state, you start to see more coincidences. Things start happening more easily and effortlessly and much more quickly.
Life doesn’t require as much effort any longer and you become more in tune with the universe all around you.
– Dalai Lama
Meditation develops your intuition
Meditation is also a great tool for improving your intuition. Intuition is an important aspect of spirituality. The more you tap into intuition, the more you listen to that inner guidance.
It’s really important to tune into your intuition, because that is your sixth sense. It also helps you to gain new insights.
As you meditate, you deepen your awareness and start seeing the world differently. Meditation is a great performance booster as well, especially if you are an artist, entertainer or an athlete.
For example, you can actually visualize your ideal performance in your mind’s eye, and visualize it with your whole body, your energy, and with all your concentrated focus. The more you can see yourself succeeding, the easier it will be in real life.
Meditation releases fear
Meditation is a great tool for overcoming past traumas and fears as well. Meditation helps you heal and find that inner balance providing you with a greater sense of wholeness.
Breathing deeply and meditating can help you let go of those fears, so you can move past traumas and get unstuck.
Meditation helps you manifest
Meditation helps you become more aware of what you want deep in your core. You can also consciously shift your awareness by practicing things like positive affirmations or simply visualizing those things you want to achieve in your mind’s eye.
Meditation can also help you manifest things. If there’s something that you want to create or something you want to do, you can visualize that in your heart. You can tune into that experience and see it in your mind’s eye.
The more you visualize what it is you want to create, the more you will start pulling in that same kind of powerful energy.
Through meditation, you can discover your personal gifts, and identify talents you never knew that you had like the ability to think creatively.
Meditation can also help you live your Dharma, and discover your true purpose, or your true-life path.
So if you feel like you’ve been sailing your ship in open uncharted waters, meditation can help you tune into your inner compass and your GPS system, so that you feel like you’re moving toward your true north.
Meditation can also help you boost your personal potential as you develop your willpower and your inner strength.
Other Cool Benefits of Meditation
There are so many cool benefits to meditation; it’s hard to list them all. In addition to everything just mentioned, meditation can also help you:
- Have a more beautiful complexion and beautiful radiant skin.
- Help you take in more oxygen, and energy from your environment.
- Help boost your cellular structure.
- Help your skin feel more vibrant.
- Boost your level of health and wellness.
- Help you accelerate the healing process.
- Find that sense of inner balance and homeostasis.
When you meditate you become more in tune with your body. You are naturally drawn to healthier practices. You eat less and may even drink less alcohol.
You start really tuning into what your body needs to thrive. So if you take care of your physical body, for example, you will receive greater benefit from even your exercise through meditation, because you’re more present with everything that you’re doing.
– Bhagavad Gita
Tips to Support a Personal Meditation Practice
Some things that can help support your personal meditation practice include:
- Maintaining a healthy diet.
- Eating more fruits and vegetables.
- Drinking more clean, clear water.
- Avoiding too much meat, cheese or alcohol.
- Cutting back on fried foods, caffeine or heavy creams.
- Eating more foods from nature.
- Surrounding yourself with positive people.
- Moving and exercising your body.
- Getting at least 7-8 hours of sleep at might.
Having a healthy environment, and surrounding yourself with positive, loving people who you resonate with you and support you can go a long way to helping you live a happier, healthier life and that’s probably the best benefit of meditation.
It’s also important to try and find a community of people that you can connect with. If you have never tried meditating with other people, you might find you really enjoy it.
So if you’re interested in meditation, and you want to know how to start, you can start with as little as 10 minutes a day.
You don’t have to try to meditate for hours at a time.
You can count your breaths backward from 10 to one or simply breathe deeply. Try setting a timer for 10 minutes and counting your breaths at each inhale and exhale. One breath is one inhale and one exhale.
You could also focus on a positive affirmation, or a state of being that you want to cultivate in your life, such as peace or calm. You can breathe in peace and breathe out calm. And remember to take your time. Don’t force this process.
If you have trouble sitting sitting, start small and work your way up to longer periods of time.
If you have a lot of thoughts, try envisioning your thoughts going by like clouds in the sky. Just like clouds float by, so do your thoughts.
Practice watching your thoughts slowly drifting by. You might be amazed at how helpful this really is.
I hope you enjoyed learning more about the beautiful practice of meditation. If you would like to learn more, we have a free toolkit on our homepage at Suraflow.Org.
On the site we offer a free toolkit with a 10 minute guided meditation and video meditation.
Thanks so much for taking time with me today. I hope you learned some really neat benefits of meditation, and we hope to support you in your personal meditation path.
