Meditation is something that has been around for centuries. Often the first images that your mind conjures up when the word mediation is mentioned are monks sitting in silence atop a mountain. The practice of meditation is nothing new but the radical rise in its popularity has meant many people who may have once dismissed the practice as new age hippy nonsense are starting to realise the benefits of a simple meditation on a daily basis.
Many highly successful business owners and entrepreneurs list meditation as one of their daily practices and swear by the advantages meditation offer to their daily lives. It is thought that anywhere from 200-500 million people meditate around the world on any given day. This has grown hugely in the last few decades, and if the number of google searches is anything to go by over 65,000 searches for meditation are made every month.
With so many people turning to meditation you might be wondering what all the fuss is about? What is meditation really good for? What is meditation anyway? Well, meditation is often confused in its understanding, many think that it’s just sitting in silence and not thinking. This is in part true, but it’s not the whole truth. Meditation comes in many forms and has many levels to it.
True transcendental meditation practised by those monks on mountain tops can take years, decades even, to fully achieve. In today’s modern world, attention spans are so short, it’s hard for people to sit still and quiet for more than 5 minutes, and almost impossible to have no thoughts for 30 seconds, so how can we practise this ancient form of personal healing?
Well, there are many modern ways to improve the experience, to hack meditation if you will. The biggest one is using music or sound frequencies to help us meditate more easily. Our minds get the most benefit from meditation when we achieve a Theta brain wave state, this is the state just between being asleep and awake. When our minds are most susceptible to influence. The reason this is the most powerful place for meditation is the introduction of mantras to help focus our thoughts feelings and desires towards a singular focus, giving us more control over our own emotions and allowing us to truly take control of our lives.
What is a mantra you say? Well, it’s very simple, it’s a statement, a thought, something to mull over if you will. Something to focus on, a singular statement that you can repeat to yourself whilst you meditate to help it sink into your subconscious. The real driver of your human meat wagon, when we program our subconscious we take control of our actions like never before. How many times do you do something that you didn’t want to do? Like eat that cake on a diet, or call your ex late at night when you’re drunk? Well, that’s your subconscious in control. What you truly want. But we can take control of our subconscious and program it using meditation and mantra. Something simple like “I have control of my destiny” or “today I will be mindful of others’ feelings” whatever you want to achieve you can do so, with the right mantra and programming of your subconscious.
6 reasons for trying meditation:
- More focus – When using daily meditation to focus your thoughts and intentions you gain clarity of mind, which allows you to focus on the things that really matter. These days we are bombarded with millions of messages every second, not just from the media marketing messages, but daily input from work colleagues, family, partners, sensory information, sounds, smells, all wanting to gain space inside your thoughts. All these messages and information are fighting for front of mind and it’s often hard to clear these away and focus on the things that will truly make a difference in your life. Meditation allows you to choose what you want to think about, you don’t have to have a completely empty mind, but a focused subject or simple statement or mantra can help you gain so much focus and give you a real insight into your daily life.
- Less Stress – Meditation is often listed as one of the best ways to destress. We all have busy lives and that can be a blessing and curse. When you feel overloaded you get stressed, and when you get stressed your mind can become a mess of noise. You have a thousand thoughts and feelings and just don’t know what to do well. Well taking some time to meditate can help you to quieten that noise. Silence the voices and the thoughts, even for just 5-10 minutes can make a massive difference. Do this daily and you’ll find your stress levels reduce dramatically in no time.
- Reduce depression – Just like stress depression can take a stranglehold of your thoughts. Depression is often described in living in the past too much. When we obsess over past mistakes, things we wish we’d done better, hurtful words that others have said to us, things beyond our control. Things you spend hours wishing had been different. Well, that’s depression, there is nothing you can do to change the past, it’s gone. It’s never coming back. Now is the only time that’s happening, even tomorrow isn’t here yet. There is a lot of power in the understanding that NOW is the only time, mindful meditation allows us to forget the past, ignore the future and just focus on right now. Sitting and focusing on the sounds in the room around you. The aromas. This brings you back to the present, and by doing this regularly you can get a grip on depression. Feeling sorry for the hand that life has dealt you will ultimately do you no good, you have to focus on the next step. What can you actually do to make just a 1% improvement today? Well, guess what meditation will help you gain that 1% improvement right away.
- Improve Sleep – How many times have you laid in bed at 2 am with a million thoughts racing through your head, wanting to shut them all off and just sleep, but your monkey mind has other plans. Meditation can help you focus your thoughts and studies have found that it can not only help get a healthy night’s sleep but can also help with insomnia too. A study published in the Jama medical journal found that meditation significantly reduced sleep impairment in adults and had a long term positive impact on quality of life.
- To manage pain – If you’ve never heard of the protest of the burning monk from 1963 I highly recommend reading this. It shows how someone deep in meditation can endure such high levels of pain and appear untouched. Of course, this is a demonstration of immense mental willpower and I’m not for one minute suggesting he wasn’t in a massive amount of pain. However, a study by the University of Montreal found that when they compared MRI scans of people who regularly meditate with people who didn’t the part of the brain which felt pain showed a significantly thicker cortex, which would indicate a higher tolerance to pain.
- Reduce blood pressure and improve relaxation – Many studies have found that meditation improves relaxation, but in a study by Dr Herbert Benson, director emeritus of the Harvard-affiliated Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine, it was found that meditation can help with high blood pressure and other issues brought on or compounded my stress. One study of elderly people with hard-to-treat blood pressure issues was able to reduce their problems and even stop their blood pressure medications when they practised meditation.
If you would like to experience one of our sound healing meditations then please visit our YouTube Channel for a selection of special meditations with a variety of focuses to help with a range of different issues. Or if you’d like to experience a live guided meditation please visit us here in Ibiza for either a personal private session or one of our monthly group events.
