The Healing Wonders Of Meditation
Posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2011 at 7:59 amThe use of meditation for healing and spiritual enlightenment has been an ancient practice that is common among the world’s great religions and cultures. It is an accepted and proven alternative therapy that is classified under “mind-body medicine.”
Most of these steps in the process focus mainly on relaxation and the clearing of the mind. Since clearing the mind can be a difficult task to achieve, people who find interest in meditation turn to guided meditation to help them to center their minds and bodies.
According to cardiologist Herbert Benson, MD: “Any condition that’s caused or worsened by stress can be alleviated through meditation.” Benson is the founder of the Mind/Body Institute at Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He said that the relaxation induced by meditation can help decrease metabolism, lower blood pressure, and improve heart rate, breathing, and brain waves. When the body receives a quiet message to relax, tension and tightness begin to seep from muscles.
Brain scans (or Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI) of people who meditate have been used to show scientific evidence that meditation really works. It shows an increase in activity in areas that control metabolism and heart rate. Other studies on Buddhist monks have shown that meditation produces long-lasting changes in the brain activity in areas involving attention, working memory, learning, and conscious perception.
Meditation is not difficult to learn but it is a skill that needs to be practiced in order to develop the ability to focus on the breathing patterns and the need to ignore distracting thoughts. Meditation is usually accompanied by a mantra, a word or phrase that is repeatedly chanted to produce a biological response such as relaxation. The soothing power of repetition is at the heart of meditation. Constant practice of meditation allows people to learn anddevelop the ability to produce meditative and relaxed states without difficulty. Meditating several times during the day makes the practitioner feel relaxed throughout the entire day.
All of the meditation methods can be grouped into one of two different categories, or styles. The first of these styles of meditation is concentrative. This means that the attention is focused on the breath, an image or a sound such as a mantra to still the mind and heighten awareness and clarity. Certain types of music can do this.
Concentrative meditation is the most popular style of meditation. The person sits quietly and focuses their attention on the breath, known as “conscious breathing.” This type of meditation is very good for relieving anxiety, stress and distraction because it causes the person to focus and relax.
By releasing this sound from the mouth, the person who is meditating finds it less complicated to eliminate excessive thoughts from the mind. Centering the mind and body in a quiet fashion is easily achieved with a mantra that is shown through a guided meditation session.
A meditative state should be achieved by the mediating person for about 15 minutes a day. However, everyone is different and many people will find that a more substantial amount of time is more beneficial for them. Through the use of guided mediation, many users have also found that the advice and process that is shown can be used throughout their day to relive stress and tension or to deal with difficult situations.
Find more information about buddhist meditation techniques and how to improve concentration with meditation.
