🕉The Benefits of Meditation🕉

🕉The Benefits of Having a Regular Meditation Practice🕉 .

. To me, meditation is the practice of deeply connecting with your inner voice, or your Higher Power, by focussing on it!

From my experience, meditation is not the practice of emptying your mind of all thoughts, but rather developing the ability to focus on a single point despite external distractions (mainly mind chatter). According to The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (sutra 1.2), 'Yogas citta vritti nirodhah,' which means 'Yoga is the cessation of mind chatter'.

Your soul is what communicates with you via your inner voice; the challenge is to hear your inner voice. Your soul is the oldest, wisest, deepest, most intelligent part of you, and it always knows the way! I believe our soul is synonymous with our Higher Power; we are one with The Universe. When we lessen the distractions of our mind chatters and ruminations through meditation, we are able to hear our inner voice, i.e. our soul, more clearly. .

. 🕉MEDITATION🕉 As you practise meditation, you develop the ability to focus your mind on something positive, whilst tuning out any external distractions. This focus soothes and declutters an overstimulated and overworked mind, which in turn destresses and relaxes the nervous system and your physical body. In this way, meditation also leads to a lot of physical health benefits, as it helps to induce the relaxation response. When the body is in a state of relaxation, it begins to employ its own self-repair and self-healing mechanisms in order to restore and renew itself. There are many different methods of meditation. Some examples include: breathwork meditation (where the practitioner focuses their attention on the inhalations and exhalations of their own breath), guided meditations (usually forms of positive or soothing visualizations whilst in a relaxed state), chanting seed mantras (e.g. 'Shreem' or 'Om'), journalling gratitude lists, or having a practice of writing, reading or speaking positive affirmations. Personally, I prefer journalling on gratitude and writing positive affirmations about Love and God. It keeps my mind focussed on Love and a Higher Power, and that focus increases my conscious awareness of the presence of It. What you focus on grows, and I notice that when I consciously meditate on Love and the Higher Power, the presence of It seems to multiply in my reality.

If you choose a more neutral form of meditation such as breathwork, it will still connect you to your Higher Power because it connects you to a deeper part of yourself. Even if you are not spiritual or religious, there is still a deeper part of your mind/being that is more intelligent and knows more than your conscious mind. At the very minimum, this is your subconscious mind that beats your heart and breathes your entire body. The subconscious mind does so much without ever needing your conscious input, and you wouldn't even know consciously how to do its job if you tried (e.g. controlling your heartbeat, or your digestion!). When you meditate, you connect to this deeper part of yourself.

During meditation, it's normal for your focus to drift a lot, especially in the beginning! With practice, your focus will improve but it's normal for it to still never be 100% perfect. Whenever you do find your focus drifting, just bring your mind back to the point you were focussing on! It is actually a good thing if you find yourself having to return to your point of focus a lot! Why!? Because it means that you are aware of having drifted. Every time you notice you have drifted, it is an opportunity to come back to and strengthen your new focus! It's all about getting back into the saddle, and that you do actually get back onto the horse, rather than declaring yourself a failure and giving up! As you keep practising, you will find that any tendency to drift lessens over time anyway - as with each repetition of refocus, you are strengthening the new neural pathways in your brain that are forming that make you a meditator.

--As with everything, meditation is best practised regularly to experience optimum benefits.--

🕉BENEFITS OF PRACTISING MEDITATION REGULARLY:🕉 .

-Reduces the biochemicals of worry, stress and anxiety; rejuvenating and regenerating-

When the body and mind are in a state of worry, fear, stress or anxiety, chemicals and hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol are released in the body. These cause the faster degeneration of telomeres (caps on the ends of DNA that prevent the DNA helices from unravelling), which leads to the ageing and degeneration of cells. Telomerase is an enzyme that both produces new telomeres and maintains existing ones, literally increasing cellular lifespan and preventing ageing! In this way, telomerase can be thought of as 'the fountain of youth'. Meditation has been found to increase telomerase activity and therefore maintain telomeres (i.e. cell lifespans), literally keeping you young! Done for enough minutes, upon coming out of meditation, you will feel slowed down and relaxed. . .

🕉-Connects you to your Higher Power & allows you to hear your intuition- Meditation silences the mind and external chatters, and connects you to Presence. When you meditate, you connect to the Universal Mind (aka Source Energy/God/The Universe/Subconscious Mind), and this is why intuitive insights may come to you during or shortly after meditation. You have focussed on your Inner Self sufficiently to allow your inner voice to come through.

We all have intuition all the time, but due to the distractions of the mind, it can be challenging to recognise it. Meditation changes your focus from outside to in, allowing you to connect with your intuition more clearly. . . 🕉-Connects you to the Present moment-

-Raises your vibration-

All of your power lies in the Present moment. Time is a manmade concept and doesn’t actually exist, therefore everything is happening now. This means that all we really have is the Present moment. Being happy and fulfilled in the Now is a pure, high vibration that attracts more external circumstances that match itself (happiness and fulfillment in the Now). Because there is no time,when you are happy in the Now, you are creating only good in your future.

Tuning out negative energy/mind chatter, reconnecting to Source Energy and relaxing and connecting to the Present moment all raise your vibrational frequency, making you a magnet for all good, and more amazing things to come!