Meditation: Mind Power Unleashed…….
Meditation has a long, praise-worthy history and has been practiced all over the world to excellent effect. It has been thoroughly researched and its benefits are well-documented. Our goal here is to afford you the opportunity to gain the benefits of a regular meditation practice. Every meditation on The Elevator has a focus that will serve a particular need for us as we journey on this Path, together.
It’s important to remember you are not actually meditating “alone” ~ even if you are physically alone ~ because every meditation offered on this website has been attended by a group, whether it’s the TAM group, our Manifesting group, or an Open Channeling group, which often has a wide variety of participants. Their energy is woven into the energy of each meditation, as surely as the energy of the Amanuensis and Theos are a part of the cumulative energy of the meditation.
While it’s easy to say a thing is good … it is better, however, to prove a thing good.
What follows are brief summations of recent research into various types of meditation, as well as the scientific conclusions reached.
Meditation Helps Keep Your Brain Young
A study from UCLA found that participants who’d been meditating for an average of 20 years had more grey matter volume throughout the brain than those who had not meditated. “We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating,” said study author Florian Kurth. “Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain.”
The Palliative Effects of Meditation Rival Antidepressants for Depression, Anxiety
A review study at Johns Hopkins looked at the relationship between mindfulness meditation and its ability to reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety and pain. Researcher Madhav Goyal and his team found that the effect size of meditation was moderate, at 0.3. If this sounds low, keep in mind that the effect size for antidepressants is also 0.3, which is pretty darn good.
Meditation is, after all, an active form of brain training. “A lot of people have this idea that meditation means sitting down and doing nothing,” says Goyal. “But that’s not true. Meditation is an active training of the mind to increase awareness and different meditation programs approach this in different ways.” Meditation is one tool that helps manage symptoms.
In fact, a follow-up study by Lazar’s team found that after meditation training, changes in brain areas linked to mood and arousal were also linked to improvements in how participants said they felt. So our subjective experience – improved mood and well-being – does indeed change through the practice of meditation.
Just a Few Days of Training Improves Concentration and Attention
Having problems concentrating isn’t just a kid thing – it affects millions of adults as well, whether they have an ADHD diagnosis or not. Interestingly but not surprisingly, one of the central benefits of meditation is improved attention and concentration. One recent study found that just a couple of weeks of meditation training helped people’s focus and memory during the verbal reasoning section of the GRE, (Graduate Record Examinations). In fact, the increase in score was equivalent to 16 percentile points, a significant improvement.
Since the strong focus of attention (on an object, idea, or activity) is one of the central aims of meditation, it’s not so surprising that meditation helps people’s cognitive skills on the job, too – but it’s nice to have science confirm it. Performing better on the job is an additional way in which meditation helps lower stress and improve overall health.
Meditation Reduces Anxiety — as well as Social Anxiety
A lot of people start meditating for its benefits in stress reduction and there’s plenty of evidence to support this reasoning. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction aims to reduce a person’s stress level, physically and mentally. Studies have shown its benefits in reducing anxiety, even years after the initial 8-week course. Research also indicates mindfulness meditation has been shown to help people with social anxiety disorder.
Meditation Reduces “Monkey Mind”
One of the most interesting studies in the last few years, carried out at Yale University, found that mindfulness meditation decreases activity in the default mode network (DMN), the brain network responsible for mind-wandering and self-referential thoughts – a.k.a., “monkey mind.”
The DMN is “on” or active when we’re not thinking about anything in particular, when our minds are just wandering from thought to thought. Since mind-wandering is typically associated with being less happy, ruminating, and worrying about the past and future, it’s the goal for many people to dial it down. Several studies have shown that meditation, through its quieting effect on the DMN, appears to do just this. Even when the mind does start to wander, because of the new connections that form during the practice of meditation, those who meditate are better at snapping back out of such states.
Meditation Can Help with Addiction
A growing number of studies have shown that, given its effects on the self-control regions of the brain, meditation can be very effective in helping people recover from various types of addiction. One study, for example, pitted mindfulness training against the American Lung Association’s freedom from smoking (FFS) program. People who learned to meditate were far more likely to quit smoking than those participating in the conventional treatment.
This may be because meditation helps people “decouple” the state of craving from the act of smoking, so the one doesn’t always have to lead to the other. Rather one fully experiences and rides out the “wave” of craving until it passes. Other research indicates specialized training involving mindfulness meditation training, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), and mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP), can be helpful in treating other forms of addiction.
Short Meditation Breaks Can Help Kids Function Better in School
For developing brains, meditation holds as much ~ or more ~ promise than it does for adults. There’s been increasing interest from educators and researchers in bringing meditation and yoga to school kids, who are dealing with the usual stressors inside school, and oftentimes additional stress and trauma outside school. There are several schools experimenting with using meditation time-outs for disruptive students gaining excellent outcomes. Not only did the recurrence rate plummet but the students also began doing better in school overall.
Some schools have started implementing meditation into their daily schedules with good effect. One district in San Francisco started a twice daily meditation program in some of its high-risk schools – and saw suspensions decrease, while GPAs and attendance increased. Studies have confirmed the cognitive and emotional benefits of meditation for schoolchildren, but it may take some time before meditation gains widespread acceptance.
Clearly, meditation brings many quantifiable benefits … and the good news is, it is easily accessible to anyone who wants to try it. We have posted a variety of meditations on the Elevator meant to help you in many areas of your life. We hope you’ll join us on the inner planes and Unleash the rewards of the Mind Power there is in Meditation.
Change your mind … change your world.