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- Basic meditation techniques, from breathing to relaxation to visualization
- Ways to use reading, walking, and even eating to meditate
- Exercises to help you become more aware of your body, energy, and senses
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What Is Meditation?
Meditation is the active practice of emptying and calming the mind. It can be integrated into your daily activities and done anywhere, anytime. Meditation is also the recognition of energy—both external and internal. All living matter is made of energy, and meditation allows you to acknowledge that energy and use it to your benefit.
Imagine the feeling you get while sitting beside a gentle waterfall or walking along the beach at sunset. In meditation, you can achieve this feeling through exercises that bring about a heightened state of awareness. In its truest sense, meditation is not something you do; it is something that simply happens.
Benefits of Meditation
Through meditation, you can develop a deeper understanding of your mind and body by doing exercises that unite the two. The benefits of meditation are physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual:
- Physical: Meditation can bring about an overall state of relaxation, release stress, promote healing, reduce the intensity of pain, decrease heart and respiration rates, lower blood pressure, and help you perform better in physical activities.
- Mental: Through observing your thoughts, you become more aware of the present and less focused on the past or future. This may help you perform day-to-day tasks more attentively and effectively.
- Emotional: When you take the time to observe your reactions to your thoughts and acknowledge the feelings that may have been lying dormant within you, your mind becomes calm.
- Spiritual: Meditation can help you better understand yourself and your purpose of being, connect with something larger than yourself, and understand those around you through simple awareness.
History of Meditation
Meditation has been practiced in many forms for thousands of years. Though many different religious and spiritual paths have brought meditation to where it is today, the focus of meditation, as ever, remains firmly in the present—the quest for personal completeness in the here and now.
Shamans
European cave drawings that date back 15,000 years depict figures in a meditative state. Historians believe these figures represented shamans, or priests and priestesses, who were entering a trance in order to meet and receive guidance from the spirits.
Meditation in India
Meditation has figured significantly in India for thousands of years, shaping the practices of Buddhism and Hinduism. Sadhus, or itinerant holy people, and yogis, people who practice yoga as a lifestyle, continue to meditate today.
Buddha was a Hindu prince who had many questions about life that he could not answer and a well-appointed but superficial lifestyle that did not bring him closer to the truths he sought. One day, rather than turn his attention outward, he focused it inward and sat and meditated for seven days. Then he awoke with a new understanding of life. Buddha, or “the awakened one,” shared his inward focus, or mindfulness, with others, and taught his followers to experience life in the present moment.
Judaism and Meditation
Some in the Jewish faith believe that meditation began with Abraham, the father of Judaism. Prophets of the Old Testament fasted to enter altered states of consciousness, using sacred phrases from scripture as mantras to connect with God. That practice of using verse and scripture is still used today.
Meditation in Western Culture
In Christianity, direct communication with God offers a connection to a higher being, and practicing contemplative prayer is a mediative act. Some historians believe that Jesus, who is thought to have fasted and prayed in the desert for 40 days and nights, also meditated. In contemplative prayer, however, the Christian focus is primarily outward rather than inward, meaning that guidance is sought from God.
Meditation in the United States
In the United States, meditation gained popularity with the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Experimentation with drugs, opposition to the Vietnam War, the rise of the Beatles, a heightened interest in communal living, and the practice of transcendental meditation were instrumental in igniting the counterculture movement, of which meditation was a part.
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