Benefits of Meditation | Health Goes Strong

Try meditation if you want to lower stress and increase focus

September 24, 2012

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Many yoga centers offer classes in meditation for beginners

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Until last month, I thought of meditation as something that other people did, a new agey practice that didn't seem at all appealing. But I changed my mind dramatically after a weekend yoga retreat with a friend.

All yoga classes at the retreat ended with a meditation period that lasted at least 15 minutes. I participated grudgingly in the beginning but after the second session, I felt transformed.

That brief period of silence and inward exploration made a huge difference in how I felt and reacted to everything else all day. I was hooked.

Since then, I've been looking for a scientific explanation of how meditation works. The best I've seen so far is in the meditation section of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Although there's still a lot of research necessary to fully understand the effects of meditation, scientists think that it may work by activated the parasympathetic nervous system, which slows down heart rate and breathing.

For the uninitiated, mediation is more than just sitting still. You have to breathe in and out in a specific pattern and focus your thoughts inward. I could never have learned this on my own so I recommend finding a good class to get started.

Have you tried meditation?

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Stephen | Sep 25, 2012

Always find it really amusing when people talk about meditation as a "new age" practice, it has been around for thousands of years, difficult to date it exactly though certainly back to the times of Hermes in 5000BC or earlier. It is something which works in a huge number of ways, many of which are less than fully understood by scientists, sadly. Though maybe one day they will be. The NCCAM does have some interesting information on meditation for sure, though another great page detailing the benefits can be found at http://www.meditationhowto.net/meditation-health-benefits and goes into good depth. Beyond that it expands out linking into other resources on meditation. Sharing "how to" guides and various other things to help people. One thing that is worth sharing here is that you can work with different breathing patterns when you meditate. Introspection is a hugely personal thing, and you can do it in almost anyway you like. Even within Zen whic is generally viewed as a very strict and specific type of meditation, there are various schools which prescribe different approaches. If you add in Yogic, chakra, mindful and other techniques you have a huge number of differences. Yet all of them achieve good effects for the practitioners. Basically, do what works for you. If you wish to tweak something so it fits you better, then do so. That way you get the best results for yourself, and that is what meditating is all about!