Meditation is a practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.
Need some motivation to start meditating?
Here are 13 reasons why you should start today!
Meditation is an effortless process that will enrich all aspects of your life. Anyone who can think a thought can meditate, and everyone will benefit from it. If you or someone dear to you is still holding out, hopefully at least one of the following 13 reasons will strike the necessary chord to get you started. Once the gifts start flowing, the only question will be, “Why did I wait so long to begin?”
1. Reduction of Stress, Fatigue and Toxins
When people in the West think of meditation, they usually associate it with stress management. Our bodies are a network of subtle channels through which our cells communicate with each other, monitoring what’s going on and asking for whatever is needed to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
When you accumulate stress, fatigue, and toxins, they act to block these channels and the communication breaks down, leading to health challenges. It’s estimated that today, more than 80 percent of illness is caused or compounded by the amount of stress you have in your life.
Meditation is a journey from external activity to inner silence. In the process of turning the awareness inward, the mind and body experience a deep level of rest. Rest is how your body naturally heals itself, and it does this by throwing off what’s not supposed to be there – stress, fatigue, and toxins.
2. Improved Quality of Sleep
There’s a lot of research these days on the health advantages of good quality sleep. Natural sleep allows your mind and body to rejuvenate. The recommendation for everyone is seven to eight hours of sleep every night.
If your life is chaotic, confusing, and anxiety-producing, this carries over into your sleep time. You end up with insomnia or at best, restless, disturbed sleep. Meditation isn’t a substitute for sleep, both are necessary, but it brings greater harmony to your life so your sleep becomes balanced and restful.
3. Better Overall Health
When you are less stressed and enjoying good quality sleep, your body is naturally better able to deal with the health challenges that may come your way. The channels of communication, mentioned above, are opened so energy and information flows freely throughout your body.
Through regular practice of meditation, the memory of wholeness and happiness is restored in all areas of your health.
4. More Meaningful Relationships
When you are feeling more relaxed, healthy, and happy, it stands to reason that your relationships with those around you begin to improve. Like physical stress, emotional stress also decreases with meditation. As you step off your emotional rollercoaster, it becomes easier to enter fully into relationships that serve your goals in life. Emotionally, like attracts like, so with meditation, you automatically begin to find yourself surrounded by happy, harmonious, peace-loving people.
5. Increased World Peace
The world is a reflection of the collective consciousness of the people who live in it. Angry people create an angry world, peaceful people create peace for everyone. Meditation takes you to that place deep within where you re-discover your connection with everyone else. Quantum physics calls this the Unified Field. You still have your individuality but begin to appreciate the Oneness underlying all the diversity. You may look different and speak a different language than others, but ultimately, we are all One family. As more and more people meditate, you can project that the sense of separation, which leads to so many of the world’s conflicts, will gradually decrease, offering the opportunity of a lasting peace for all humanity.
6. Ability to Live the Full Potential of Life
Deep within each of us, covered over by the layers of stress, fatigue, and toxins of everyday life is a person who is perfectly happy, healthy, and fulfilled. Meditation allows you to peel off these layers and reintroduces you to this perfect person, who is none other than your own true self. Meditation opens the door for you to bring the perfection back into your life, to make your life meaningful and re-awaken your full potential.
7. A More Joy-Filled Life
Though most people may have forgotten, you live in a recreational universe. When you take the time to look beyond the superficial turmoils to see the beauty of nature, children laughing, flowers blooming, birds singing, you may realize what a joyful creation you live in. Meditation takes you beyond the external chaos to an inner place of peace and contentment. Meditation allows you to unfold your inner joy, returning the magic, innocence, and playfulness into your life.
8. Improved Clarity of Thinking and Creativity
For many people, their minds are on constant overdrive. All your creativity comes from a source deep within but, if your mind is chaotic and confused, it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, the meaningful from the nonsense.
With regular meditation, your thoughts become more organized, allowing you to remain focused on the important things in your life. As your thinking becomes more settled and clear, you open the door for an effortless flow of creativity, insight, and inspiration.
9. Greater Acceptance, Understanding, and Forgiveness
Meditation brings a greater sense of stability and security to your life. When you recognize your own inner strength, you cease to feel threatened by the world around you. As you grow in love and compassion, you find it easier to accept the faults of others, understanding that everyone is doing the best they can in any moment. Greater acceptance and understanding opens the way for forgiveness and the freedom it brings to your life.
10. Increased Abundance
The Divine withholds nothing from you, everything you can possibly imagine is here right now, you just need to be open to receive. Stress, doubts, and feelings of unworthiness block the flow of abundance. Through meditation your life can become effortless and expansive; when you live from the level of infinite possibilities, all good things begin to spontaneously flow to you.
11. Inner Peace
Underneath all the noise and superficial activity there’s a field of silence. A place of eternal, unbounded peace. Every time you meditate, you go to this place, you dip into the stillness. By regularly alternating between meditation and your normal daily activities, you begin to establish this state of inner peace as the foundation of your life. Even in the midst of dynamic activity, you still remain clam, centered, and purposeful.
12. Enlightenment
For those on a spiritual path, the ultimate goal of life is enlightenment. Meditation rekindles the memory of who you are at the deepest level of your being – the memory that you are already and always have been enlightened. Meditation re-aligns you with your true purpose in life, your Dharma. Meditation re-awakens the memory that you are Divine Spiritual Beings and that you are the Universe.
13. It’s Easy to Learn
If you’re still not convinced that meditation is right for you, here’s one final reason: It’s never been easier to learn.
If you’d wanted to learn meditation 100 years ago, you’d have had to travel to India, find an ashram with a qualified teacher, and probably spend months proving that you were worthy to receive instruction. Well, now you don’t have to travel to India or far at all.
