Stress take its toll on our health. Mental
and physical stress drain our energy, leaving us depleted physically, mentally and emotionally.
Meditation is fast gaining popularity amongst conventional medical practitioners
since it can help to get your body down to basic again. There are good positive
results if people meditate sometime during the day.
What is meditation?
Meditation help us focus and calm the mind,
resulting in relaxed and restful state of physical and mental being.
Meditation is generally focused on one constant thing which could be your breathing. Meditation is an effective tool to gain mind control, self-awareness and understanding that eventually lead to inner peac. For people practice meditation, it can lead to profound experiences of self-realization and transcendental awareness. A proven alternative therapy, meditation is a known stress reliever.
Meditation is positive not only psychologically but
also has positive effects on various health conditions ranging from blood pressure, insomnia to depression. There are different techniques of meditation.
Meditation has also been harnessed to alleviate pain, suffering and promote healing for centuries in different cultures and religions, in
various forms.
Types of meditation
Various types of meditation originate from various parts of the world. Prayer is possibly the most common one, the others are
transcendental meditation, Zen meditation, Buddhist meditation, Taoist meditation
and some other ideas.
The body under meditation
Scientific experimentation and research has found out how the human body reacts under profound meditation. It has been found that the meditation process counteracted the effects of the sympathetic nervous system - the one that wants to fight or flee. Whereas the sympathetic system dilates the pupils and gets the heart rate, respiration and blood pressure up, the parasympathetic system, activated when we meditate, does just the opposite.
Muscle tension decreases, blood pressure drops, and for some extraordinary practitioners, even temperature and basal metabolism rates drop during a prolonged meditation. Oxygen needs of the body are reduced when you are in a highly relaxed state, and brain waves change from the busy beta waves to the blissful alpha waves.
Meditation Techniques
There are two major ways to meditation, which are Concentrative Meditation and Mindfulness Meditation.
Explained as follows -
1. Concentrative Meditation
The approach to still the mind is to focus the attention on the breath, image or sound (mantra). This gives way to greater awareness and clarity. In its basic form concentrative meditation requires you to sit quietly and focus your attention on your breath. Practitioners of yoga and meditation believe that there is a direct correlation between one's state of mind and one's breath. For e.g. when a person is anxious, frightened, agitated or distracted, the breath will tend to be shallow, rapid and irregular. On the other hand, when the mind is calm, focused and composed, the breath tends to be slow, deep and regular.
2. Mindfulness
Meditation
In this type of meditation, the mind is aware of all that is happening
around you. You just observe the sounds, feelings,
sensations, images, thoughts,
smells etc without getting involved in them or
thing about them.
The
meditating person is just like a spectator who is witnessing
everything but one who does not react or get involved with
thoughts, memories, feelings, worries or images.
This helps to
gain a more calm, clear and non-reactive state of mind.