Oct 032012

photo credit Sean Boggs

What is “meditation”?  It means many things to many people but one thing is for sure, it has been practiced for thousands of years… and people keep doing it– why?

To practice meditation means that you are moving from a state of intellectual input and output (or what I call “living in your mind”) to a state of calm, peace and presence.

There are many benefits of this change ….
One benefit is the chance to calm your mind and your emotions.  When we live in the area of the mind that is of stress, frustration, anger, fear, or other negative emotions and thoughts, this creates a physical response in the body which creates adrenaline and other stress hormones that can be toxic to the body if not used up (in our fight or flight nature).  So regular meditation helps us to tell our nervous system that we are ok, we can be calm and that we don’t have to release so many of these chemicals into our bodies.  Spending more time each day in a state of peace is one of the best things you can do for your health.

Another reason people practice meditation is to seek oneness with The Divine, or with their Divine nature.  To sit in silence, very calm and focused, practicing one pointed concentration and letting go of the daily grind of thoughts and emotions, means to hear the stillness around you.  When you start to become part of that stillness, you realize that it is not really stillness, it is all energy, and you are that energy, and God is also that energy.  So everything in this Earth, everything around us and in us, everything that came before us and after us, is energy.  Can we connect to that?  Can we feel our own Divine Nature… what came before and what comes after?  This is not an easy task and thus why we call meditation a “practice” .  It is not something to accomplish (that can be argued), but something to get better and better at and to notice that as we practice…the perspective we have about our lives will change, and the things we worried about before may start to seem small compared to the realization of our connection to the Universe– how small we are, and yet how big we are.

Keep PRACTICING meditation.  Make a special place in your house to go and seek out this peace.
Om Shanti Shanti Shanti (Peace)