What Happens When People Meditate for the First Time?

enlightenmentChristina Sarich, Contributor
Waking Times

There have been numerous studies detailing what happens to the brain in long-term meditators, but what exactly happens to people who meditate for the first time?

Sara Lazar, a Harvard researcher, has gained quite some notoriety detailing how the brain actually grows grey matter when people meditate. Other studies have shown that meditation improves IQ, and lessens depression. In addition to these benefits, meditation also:

  • Aids cancer patients (Ledesma & Kumano, 2009)


Still not fast enough for you?

Meditation for the First Time



Beginner Meditators



Masters of Meditation




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  • John Tischer

    What happens when people first meditate, is, for the first time, they see that they
    actually have thoughts. Many people who are given instructions to “pay attention
    to the breath.” and such instructions feel immediate frustration because thoughts
    seem to have such energy and are so distraction. Many beginning meditators complain
    that they can’t “meditate”, because of the energy of their thinking process, and quit
    because they think they are not getting anywhere. The benefits put forth in the article
    are true… but the effects of meditation come only if one practices without expectations.
    The expectations themselves are the obstacles

  • mothman777

    Paramahamsa Hariharananda, the Kriya yoga master, could stop his heart completely, stop his breath completely, stop all brain waves completely and stop all blood flow completely, measured on hospital monitoring equipment supervised by independent trained medical staff, in a hospital setting, such that his readings were exactly those of a dead person, for a full half hour, which really freaked the medical staff out, in a personal account given to me by my Kriya Yoga swami teacher some years ago, who was a direct disciple of Hariharananda, as the medical staff were thinking they should use emergency measures to try to resuscitate him, and then he simply opened his eyes after half an hour, smiled, got up, and simply walked away. This was something Paramahamsa Hariharananda could do repeatedly at will, and after a while, you are indeed able to stop breathing almost, and I experienced that even through TM Maharishi yoga method years before that, with only the slightest sip of air, barely even noticeable, coming in only every two minutes or so, but that is not forced or willed by the way, nor should it ever be so, as that occurs spontaneously when a different type of consciousness is entered into, and the soul and body are nourished by prana from beyond the normal physical breathing process.

    The entire perception of even having a physical body is only a given percept in any case, not being any more than a very dense astral type of dream image itself, and when the external physical senses are created around the soul, then the soul sees the physical body and the material world, and under false egotism, begins to mistakenly and falsely self-identify with the physical body, the physical senses, the physical brain and subtle physical, or astral type bodies which their subtle material senses, as it’s own true real self, when in fact, all those things are merely illusory, to graduate beyond.

    In the Guinness Book of Records, a white belt martial artist, similarly beyond the normal range of physical perception, under the televised supervision of Ross McWhirter, who tested his body for the presence of Hollywood stunt type chemicals to prevent burning, and found none, poured a ladle full of boiling liquid lead over several one quarter inch or so thick bands of leather, and the lead burned through them all instantly, then he opened his mouth, and tipped another full ladle of boiling liquid lead in his mouth and held the lead in his closed mouth for 20 seconds, and then spat it out onto several more bands of one quarter inch thick leather, which the lead burned through instantly, and when Ross McWhirter checked inside his mouth, there was not a single burn in the man’s mouth.

    My first yoga session when I was initiated with Kriya yoga resulted in Paramahamsa Yogananda appearing to me, as a young man, smiling to me and his face was moving around, just like I was looking at him from just a few feet away, but he had left his mortal body quite a number of years before that, and he appeared to me at the end of a black and white conical checkered tunnel. After that, when I meditated, I was often visited by Paramahansa Sri Yukteswar, and Babaji Mahavatar too, and came to see Paramahansa Hariharananda a great deal also, and the rest of the Kriya lineage of teachers.

    Meditation relies greatly not only on changes in metabolism, sense withdrawal, etc., but also on a direct link with the consciousness of someone who exists on a higher plane, to draw the disciple onto a higher plane of consciousness, with different levels of consciousness being attained by centering one’s consciousness in different chakras and using mantras and breathing exercises to alter flow of prana. Ultimately we begin to have a concrete understanding that just as this world exists, other ‘world’ planes exist in different dimensions where we can experience different qualities of consciousness, some much more dense in depth of richness of quality of sense perception than this material world, much more real in fact, and we can prepare to graduate here in this world to move onto those other, higher planes and dwell there, with the consciousness surviving after the dissolution of this present material vehicle, which is, literally just a very realistic dream, a more concrete version of the dream bodies we experience in our sleep at night, but ultimately, the fully awakened senses of the eternal spirit soul itself, beyond the artificially imposed temporal gross and subtle physical senses under maya, are the most alive and the most concrete of all, being extremely satisfying when focussed on their intended sense percept, the sustaining Godhead, Whose soul is actually also the substance of the higher worlds, that Godhead also being able to manifest in a more medium humanlike form also, as Krishna. or Govinda, rather than being manifest just as formless living spiritual planets, living spiritual water, living spiritual sky, and so on, and we can come to associate with many other souls there who are all dwelling in the original dimension that we all came from in the first place, from a plane which never had to come into existence, a plane which naturally fills the entire expanse of the cosmic infinitude, a plane of pure consciousness, of pure intellect, of perfect love, where all souls possess a musical quality, and perfect undecaying beauty, that never becomes hackneyed, always having the quality of eternally new freshness.

    The avadhuta yogi may come to be enlightened without any formal yoga initiation or techniques or external human guru, being spiritually awakened by the eternally indwelling Godhead, who can also appear in nature, like the flowing rivers, the air and wind, the mountains, and in plants, animals, insects, birds and other people all around them.

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