I have been meditating for only about 9 months - 20 minutes each morning. I'm very new at this, and I spent a few months "looking in to it" before I decided to try it. In just the first 3 months there was a noticeable difference in how I feel, how I react to situations, how focused I feel, and how controllable my impulses feel. After just one week I felt like I could take myself off Adderal for my ADHD and stopped taking it. I now honestly feel like I have to mediate every single day, without fail.
Because of my own experience, I just want to share this with all of you; I hope someone might find value to this and maybe implement it in their life.
Medical Evidence of the Benefits of Meditation
Working towards improving our ability to block out distractions has been overlooked for a long time. In today's time we have more distractions than ever before. So many things are constantly going on and our brains are working way too hard. Meditation allows us to develop the ability for focus and control at all times. There is more and more medical evidence coming out about the affects of meditation that prove the health benefits.
- Meditation actually has been found to reduce stress levels in people after just 3 days of one 25-minute session a day.
-Reduced stress levels lead to reduced cortisol which can reduce belly fat
-MRI's reveal that meditation strengthens the brain - it actually builds grey matter in your brain.
-Medically documented effects of meditation on the brain:
Frontal lobe
This is the most highly evolved part of the brain, responsible for reasoning, planning, emotions and self-conscious awareness. During meditation, the frontal cortex tends to go offline.
Parietal lobe
This part of the brain processes sensory information about the surrounding world, orienting you in time and space. During meditation, activity in the parietal lobe slows down.
Thalamus
The gatekeeper for the senses, this organ focuses your attention by funneling some sensory data deeper into the brain and stopping other signals in their tracks. Meditation reduces the flow of incoming information to a trickle.
Reticular formation
As the brain’s sentry, this structure receives incoming stimuli and puts the brain on alert, ready to respond. Meditating dials back the arousal signal.
Learn to Meditate
There are several different forms of meditation that I've learned about. Here's just a few:
1. Mindfullness. This is what I practice and what I know most about. Mindfullness is about being in tune with all your thoughts and being aware of how the things around you make your senses feel. It's about being in the "here and now", being very mindful and conscious of everything going on around you. I'll expand on my experience with this later.
2. Transcendental Meditation is what I interpret as the evolution of Mindful Meditation. I think I'm slowly moving more towards this method .
3. Qi gong. This is a form of meditation that focuses on the breath and spreading energy around your body. It's a taoist method.
4. Guided Visualization. This is a newer method that involves visualization and concentration on an image or place.
5. There's also trance based, Zazen, and even heart-rhythm based meditation too.
Success Through Stillness - Russell Simmons
I started with reading this book. It finishes with Russell explaining very simply, how to meditate using the mindful/transcendental methods. This book got me rolling and inspired me. He tells stories about his successful friends like Oprah, D. Wade, Ellen, and others who attribute a huge part of their success to meditation. This is an excellent read for anyone who wants to get started with meditation. I'll try and post up a quick summary of a simple meditation method that he uses with a very simple mantra.
Russell Simmon's book is very strange. He doesn't actually teach TM. Think about it:
ReplyDeleteif he COULD teach TM through a book, he would not have donated $30,000,000.00 to the David Lynch Foundation so that they could send trained TM teachers to public schools and have THEM teach TM for free. He would have just sent the schools copies of his book.
Instead, he donates a huge fortune to the DLF and they honor him by putting him at the top of the list of the Board of Advisors:
https://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/board-of-advisors.html
and then they just kinda sigh and roll their eyes when he publishes his book.
Personally, I think it is a vanity thing: he just wants everyone to think of him as a guru, but look where he actually puts his money when he wants kids to learn to meditate.