Benefits of Meditation

Meditation is a simple and profound way of stabilizing the mind and take a break from daily anxiety. Just like developing other skills, meditation also required daily practice. You can make more mastery on it with time. A more intense level of meditation gives you more benefits. For thousands of years, people have practiced meditation for spiritual, emotional, and physical wellbeing. Meditation can be done in so many ways, there are different types of mediation process. But the benefits of meditation remain almost the same.

We can split these benefits into three categories as follows:

• Mental Benefits
• Physical or Health Benefits 
• Spiritual Benefits

Mental Benefits

Meditation brings the mind in peaceful mode. Meditation is like an exercise for a mind. It helps our minds to become more active and profound. A study from UCLA says that long-term meditators had better-preserved brains than non-meditators as they aged. 

Following are the mental benefits of meditation:

• Reduce Stress and Anxiety: Most of the time reducing stress is the main aim of meditators. In the meditation process, the mind comes to its ease. So, the stress level in the mind reduces.
• Improve Concentration and Attention Span: Daily practice of meditation gives you control over your thoughts, because of that you can concentrate on important things (work, study, lecture, meetings, etc.) for a long period without interruption of unnecessary thoughts.
• Improve Memory: Improved concentration and focus through regular meditation practice increase your memory and mental clarity. It also fight against age-related memory loss and dementia.
• Keeps active throughout the day: As meditation is like exercise for the mind. It energized mind and keep energy levels high throughout the day.
• Emotional stability improves: Meditation is a process of spending time with yourself and is a journey of self-discovery. In this process, we can get more in touch with our emotions. We may realize the root cause of our worry or unrest. Regular meditation helps us recognize our emotional drama. So we get more emotionally stronger.
• Increase Kindness and Decrease Anger: Regular meditation increases your mental stability so you can easily manage your anger and become kind. Most of the time in angry mood we take wrong decisions which may create a big problem in the future so we must control our anger. Kindness gives us different kind of energy, forgiving anyone releases thoughts of that person and make our mind free and happy. So we can invest our time and energy in other important work.
• Help to Fight with Addictions: You can develop the mental discipline through meditation. Which helps you to break your regular patterns or bad habits or addictions.

Physical benefits or Health Benefits

Most people think meditation only helps mental fitness, but our physical health mostly depends on our mental situation. So, because of the mental benefits of meditation consequently, improve our physical health too.

Following are the benefits of physical health:

• Maintain Blood Pressure: Studies show that regular meditation helps in maintaining blood pressure. Mainly high blood pressure can be reduced. Meditation reduces mental stress which ultimately slows down the blood pressure by lowering the strain on the heart and arteries.
• Helps to Sleep Better: So many people struggled for hours to sleep because of thoughts racing through their minds. Worrying about past and future interferes in our sleep at night. Meditation gives clarity to our mind and thought process, which then automatically avoids such worrying thoughts and just focus on the present situation. Meditation helps to relax body and mind, which falls asleep quickly and gives better sleep. Better sleep can help in eliminating many health problems.
• Improve Immunity: Studies of lowering the risk of cancer with meditation suggest that regular meditation practice can boost the lymphocyte count in the body, which helps in developing a natural shield for fighting toxic cells that create the fatal disease.
• Helps Control Pain: Your perception of pain is connected to your state of mind, and it can be elevated in stressful conditions. If you give less attention to your pain you can see you feel less hurt. Similarly happens with meditation you don't overestimate pain, so you can control more pain.

Spiritual Benefits

People generally don't know about the spiritual benefits of meditation. For that, you need to observe your life process. Starting the process of your life was not your conscious choice. When you born you were so small, then you grow gradually. The food you ate makes your body. So obviously, the body is something that you gathered. It is an accumulation of food. Same for the mind, the mind is an accumulation of impressions, thoughts, teachings around us. What you accumulate will be yours but can't be you. Accumulation means gathered from somewhere else. Presently you may weigh 80 kg and if you drop it to 70 kg, then you don't have to look for that 10 kg. Once you drop it, it is gone. Similarly, your mind is an accumulation.

We generally consider our body and mind as "myself". Actually, by experience, we only know our body and mind. The moment you identify yourself that you are not, your perception gets distorted. You cannot perceive life the way it is. You only perceive life as necessary for survival. Survival is very important for human beings, but it is not enough. For other creatures on the planet, if the stomach is full then life would be settled. But for human beings life does not end with survival. Actually, for human beings, life begins only after survival fulfilled.

Meditation gives you an experiential clarity, an inner state, where what is you and what is yours is separated. There is a little distance or space between what is you and what you have accumulated. This little separation brings absolute clarity of perception. You see life just the way it is, no distortion about it. Once you understand this, you naturally become meditative. You want to clear your vision on everything and just look at life the way it is. Then you walk through life with the least amount of friction. Least amount of friction saves more amount of energy, so you can do more work with absolute dedication.