By Vikas Malkani
14th September 2016
Meditation shows you how you function, how you create your life experience and even how to choose what you want your life to be. In other words, meditation is the fastest path to understanding the mind and taking charge of your life!
The benefits of meditation are many. It works on the physical body and also goes deeper to the emotional and mental levels of the practitioner. Those who continue to learn and grow with meditation find emotional and spiritual benefits too.
Learning the ‘Meditation Made Simple’ class at SoulCentre is easy, and the meditation techniques can be practised anywhere to see quick benefits.
Even a few minutes a day of meditation practice brings about very important benefits. Here are the top 3 from my perspective –
1) Meditation reduces stress and improves health problems - Up to 70% of health problems are psychosomatic, that is, they have a mental origin, so it is easy to understand how control over our thoughts that meditation brings can help many of these disorders.
Meditation releases stress, which then causes our muscles to relax, including the muscular walls of our blood vessels. This means more blood can pump through the vessels and there is less resistance to the overall flow. This means less blood pressure.
In contrast, high blood pressure is recognised as a major factor in producing heart diseases and heart attacks.
2) Meditation develops a whole-brain perspective - Studies show meditation has a balancing and harmonising effect on the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
Our left hemisphere is responsible for our logical thinking. The right side is responsible for feelings. Due to fast-paced modern life, many of us tend to operate more from the left hemisphere. We think too much and analyse too much, at the expense of our feelings.
Meditation allows us to have the right balance of logical analytical thought and emotional feelings, thus helping develop a ‘whole brain’ mind-set.
3) Meditation creates happiness, compassion and gratitude - One method of meditation is mindfulness, which is all about living in the moment, rather than focusing on past regrets or future worries. Naturally, this creates feelings of relaxation, gratitude, joy and happiness. One becomes more patient and compassionate with the practice of meditation.
Relaxed blood vessels allow increased blood flow to all body parts. Increased blood flow to the brain means we feel fresher and can think more clearly.
Meditation also reduces the production of the body’s stress hormones. Studies show that hormone levels in those who practice meditation regularly are similar to those in people up to ten years younger. This is one of the reasons why meditators look and feel younger.
With regular meditation, we tend to fall asleep quicker and our sleep is deeper. This means we get a better quality sleep and wake up feeling fresher and more alive. We also feel more energetic and calmer throughout the day.
Vikas Malkani is an internationally renowned teacher of meditation classes, and the best-selling author of The ‘Little Manual of Meditation’.
For attending a meditation class with Vikas Malkani, connect to us at : info@soulcentre.org
