REASONS TO MEDITATE. Part 3 of 4.

Now for the exciting news! As I said previously on this website, meditation is a time-tested remedy to fragmentation, alienation, isolation, stress, and even stress-related disorders. Although it will not fix your life's outward difficulties, it will help you develop inner resilience, balance, and the ability to roll with the punches and find creative solutions.

Consider your body and mind a complicated computer to understand how meditation works. You've been conditioned to respond to life's inevitable ups and downs with tension, worry, and unhappiness, rather than inner peace, harmony, serenity, and pleasure. However, you can alter your programming. By setting aside all other tasks, sitting quietly, and focusing on the present moment for at least 10 or 15 minutes each day, you're creating a new set of habitual reactions and programming yourself to experience more pleasant emotions and mind-states. In reality, a growing mass of studies demonstrates that meditation significantly improves the brain. Of course, if the thought of oneself as a computer bothers you, imagine life as an ocean, with the continual ups and downs you experience as the waves that churn and roil on the water's surface. You dive under the surface to a calmer and more constant ocean area when you meditate. Whatever metaphor you like, the idea is that meditation allows you to turn tension and suffering into serenity and peace.

You’ll now learn how meditators have reaped the incredible advantages of meditation for millennia – and how you can, too!

Traditionally, the West has prioritised external accomplishment, whereas the East has stressed interior growth. While yogis and roshis in Asia's monasteries and ashrams were practising the inner arts of meditation, the great scientific and technical advancements of the last 500 years arose in the West. East and West currents and North and South currents have now merged. They are mingling to produce one developing global culture and economy. Consequently, we may use the inner "technology" mastered in the East to balance the excesses of the West's fast technical breakthroughs! Like expert computer programmers, the great meditation masters of history gained the ability to programme their bodies, brains, and emotions to experience highly tuned states of being. While we in the West were mapping the sky and kicking off the Industrial Revolution, they were accomplishing some fairly impressive things of their own like:

• Deep insights into the nature of the mind and how it produces and perpetuates pain and stress

• Deep ecstatic absorption phases in which the meditator is entirely immersed in oneness with the Divine The ability to distinguish between relative reality and the holy dimension of one's existence.

• The development of pleasant, useful, life-affirming mind-states such as patience, love, kindness, serenity, joy, and, most importantly, compassion for the suffering of others.

• The capacity to exert deliberate control over biological systems such as heart rate, body temperature, and metabolism.

• The ability to mobilise and circulate vital energy via the body's many centres and channels for healing and personal growth.

• Clairvoyance, the capacity to sense things beyond conventional perception, and telekinesis are examples of special psychic abilities.

Of course, great meditators of the past exploited these traits to achieve freedom from suffering, either by withdrawing from the world into a more holy reality or by gaining piercing insights into the essence of life. However, the meditation technology they invented, widely available in the West in recent decades, may be utilised in ordinary, daily ways by the rest of us to generate exceptional advantages.

Although the first scientific studies of meditation date back to the 1930s and 1940s, research into the psychophysiological effects of meditation took off in the 1970s, thanks to a growing interest in Transcendental Meditation (TM), Zen, Vipassana, and other Eastern meditation approaches.

Thousands of studies have been published since then, with an exponential surge in research over the last 15 to 20 years as brain-imaging equipment has gotten more advanced. For the time being, here is a concise summary of the major advantages of meditation:

Physiological advantages: Reduced heart rate, Reduced blood pressure, and reduced stress recuperation time. Beta (brainwaves related to thinking) decreases while alpha, delta, and gamma increase (brainwaves associated with deep relaxation and higher mental activity). Improved synchronisation (simultaneous operation) of the brain's right and left hemispheres (which positively correlates with creativity). There are fewer heart attacks and strokes. Prolonged life expectancy, lower cholesterol levels ,reduced energy usage and oxygen need, slower, deeper breathing, relaxation of the muscles, and pain intensity reduction.

Psychological advantages: More joy and ease of mind, greater appreciation for the current time, fewer severe negative feelings and extreme mood swings; less emotional reactivity. More loving, peaceful partnerships, empathy has grown. Increased self-actualisation and creativity, perceptual clarity and sensitivity have improved. Anxiety levels, both acute and chronic, are reduced

The following meditation, which has yoga and Buddhist parallels, assists in re-establishing touch with the body by gradually moving attention from one place to another. It is an excellent introduction to more formal meditation practice since it cultivates awareness while relaxing muscles and internal organs. Allow at least 20 minutes to finish. (Complete audio instructions are available upon request.)

1. Lie on your back on a soft surface – but not too soft, unless you intend to fall asleep.

2. Take a few seconds to feel your entire body, particularly the points where it touches the surface of the bed or floor.

3. Pay attention to your toes. Allow yourself to experience any feelings in this location. If you're not experiencing anything, simply experience "without feeling anything." Imagine inhaling into and out of your toes as you breathe. (If this seems strange or uncomfortable, simply breathe normally.)

4. Once you've finished with your toes, continue on to your soles, heels, tops of your feet, and ankles, feeling each component like you did your toes. Allow yourself plenty of time. The goal of this practice is not to achieve anything, not even to relax, but to be totally present wherever you are.

5. Gradually work your way up your body, taking at least three or four deep breaths with each section. The general sequence is the lower legs, knees, thighs, hips, pelvis, lower abdomen, lower back, solar plexus, upper back, chest, and shoulders. Now concentrate on both sides' fingers, hands, and arms, followed by the neck and throat, chin, jaws, face, back of the head, and top of the head. By the time you reach the top of your skull, the boundaries between you and the rest of the world may have grown more flexible — or maybe dissolved totally. You may feel silent and motionless at the same moment, devoid of your typical anxiety or restlessness.

6. Relax for a few seconds, then gradually return your focus to your entire body.

7. Wiggle your toes and fingers, open your eyes, rock side to side, and sit up softly.

8. Before getting up and starting your day, stretch and familiarise yourself with your surroundings.

Come back tomorrow for part 4.

Be well.

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