Meditation isn’t only for the monks among us. Experience the many benefits of daily meditation for relief from anxiety and depression, improved concentration, peace of mind, and better sleep.
Meditate Your Way to Wellness
Happily, the benefits of training in meditation arrive long before mastery does.
– Sam Harris
You don’t need to be an expert to reap the rewards of daily meditation, but you can easily arrive at specialist status when it comes to experiencing stress.
Understanding the body’s stress response
Most stress nowadays is psychosomatic. Though the body, being the ancient instrument it is, will still perceive the threat as physical, preparing to fight or flee. Your cortisol levels will go up, as will your heart rate, blood will rush to your muscles, brain, legs and arms, and your breathing will become rapid as oxygen floods your cells. This is a useful and appropriate response when your life is truly in danger – so that you can run, hide, or defend yourself. Of course, it is not the appropriate response to a demanding work email, a text message from a friend being a little too honest, an overly critical social media comment, or whatever existential crisis is plaguing you in the middle of the night.
Continued chronic stress can raise your blood pressure, disrupt your attention span, inhibit deep sleep, and ultimately lead to anxiety and depression.
Unexpected causes of stress
There are the “meta” stresses that subconsciously creep up on us and compound. Like the overwhelm of endless choice, leaving us feeling anxious and dissatisfied. Kierkegaard, Danish theologian and philosopher, notably called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom”.
Repressing your emotions can further compromise both your mental well-being and physical well-being. In his book When The Body Says No, Gabor Maté, renowned physician and author, details how repression in itself can become a stressor to the body:
“When emotions are repressed, this inhibition disarms the body’s defenses against illness. Repression — dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm — disorganises and confuses our physiological defenses so that in some people these defenses go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors.”
Accumulating late nights can become a stressor too, as sleep helps our bodies regulate, and the lack of it can exacerbate the effects of stress. Long-term sleep deprivation can cause an increase in blood pressure, a higher heart rate, and systemic inflammation.
And of course there is the stress of stressing about your stress. A concept philosopher Alan Watts called double abstraction.
What to do about it
The good news is that this stress response is internal, created within your own mind and body. It is influenced more by our perception of an event rather than the event itself. We are affected not by what something is, but by what it means to us. By having a little distance between ourselves and our thoughts, we may be able to change our own story of who we think we are and what has happened to us. How do we do this? Meditation, of course.
What is meditation?
Meditation is another way of bringing awareness to what we are feeling and experiencing. If you can identify what emotions are coming up in any given situation, you can begin to distinguish between reactions appropriate to the context you’re in, and reactions that are being heavily influenced by memories of the past (known as triggers). By paying attention to the sensations in your body (the tightness in your chest, the beating of your heart etc.) and by naming what you are feeling, you develop emotional competence. This helps dissolve and integrate otherwise unconscious tension that could build up in the body
How to meditate
“Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet.” Julia Denos writes, author of the beautifully illustrated Here and Now, a children’s book on mindfulness.
Of course, there is a little more to meditation than sitting down and being quiet. The only thing needed to complete this formula is the addition of conscious awareness. Listening to your breath, the sounds within the room, a mantra, or music. If you are struggling to anchor your mind in the rivers of thought, you can use a guided meditation, such as The Pantheon Method, to hold your hand as you begin your practice. A common misconception is that meditation is the absence of thought. In fact it is quite the opposite. Meditation is learning to observe your thoughts without judgment. It is not about being better, or perfect or more productive. It is about meeting yourself where you are, as you are.
“Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. And therefore, if you meditate for an ulterior motive — that is to say, to improve your mind, to improve your character, to be more efficient in life — you’ve got your eye on the future and you are not meditating!”
– Alan Watts
The benefits of meditation
Earlier we touched on the effects of the body’s stress response. Amazingly, meditation can actually reverse such effects. It slows and normalizes the heart rate, reduces stress hormones like cortisol, deepens your breathing and strengthens your immune system. Meditation also increases the sleep hormone melatonin, as well as its precursor serotonin, so along with a relaxed body and soothed mind, it sets you up for a good night’s sleep.
The benefits of meditation are most powerfully felt when you develop a consistent practice – be it for five, ten or fifteen minutes a day. Daily practice is ideal and may be something you work towards, gradually increasing your time spent doing it as you go along. The best form of meditation you can do is the one you like most (so that you stick with it). In a recent study, people who attended a six week meditation retreat experienced fewer symptoms of depression and stress for up to 10 months afterwards. That was after only six weeks of meditating – imagine how much more could be gained if you could turn it into a daily habit!
Tim Ferriss, author of Tools of Titans and The Four Hour Workweek, describes his experience with daily practice, “Meditation simply helps you channel drive toward the few things that matter, rather than every moving target and imaginary opponent that pops up.”
Bin He, a neuroengineer at Carnegie Mellon University, has been studying the brains of Tibetan monks, who have spent years of their lives meditating. What he and his colleagues have discovered is that the longer you’ve been meditating for, the better your brain becomes at self regulating. This means you can more easily get into states of relaxation or focus without expending unnecessary resources and energy.
One of the most beautiful and profound benefits of meditation is the presence of mind it gives you. To be in the here and now. Appreciating what you’ve got. Accepting where you’re at, and making the most of what you have. Waking up to your own beingness.
Breathe in and breathe out with The Pantheon Method
So, find a comfortable spot, sit down, close your eyes and breathe. The benefits will surely come. For a more hands on experience for developing a consistent meditation practice, sign up for The Pantheon method.
