I know, I can hear you saying it now, “Why would Meditation Help Me? Isn’t Meditation for the Great Eastern Gurus?” The categorical answer is NO! Every single person on this planet should learn to meditate to help you in your day-to-day growth, to help you cope with the world and to help you deal with your anxiety.
Let me explain Â…
The whole role of meditation is to help find your inner peace that is the art of putting all that chaos in your mind and you life into some sort of order. The first step of meditation is bringing you to a point of calm, a point of peace upon which you can build and manage control. Once you have achieved that you can further explore your own mind. Our mind today often swirls with information, facts, stress, worries and much more simply because of the way in which we live and the bombardment of information from commercial entities. The role of meditation is to help you find a way of managing that information and to reflect on your surroundings.
Meditation will help you to find that point at which you can cope and manage all the bombardments without feeling over whelmed but that is not the only reason we meditate. Let me outline four reasons why you should consider learning the art of meditation.
Reason 1 – Meditation Will Assist You In Calming
One of the core reasons why an individual might learn meditation is to help with their ability to cope with stress and to become calm. One of the roles of meditation is to help release the alpha waves in both our left and right side of our brains. These alpha waves will help bring about a sense of calm, similar to when you would whistle a happy tune or simply day dream.
Learning to meditate and bring you to a state of calm will help you cope with the daily stress of life. From personal experience I have found that if I do not meditate for 20 minutes a day minimum, I find that my ability to cope with the daily stress of work is far harder then when I have completed my meditation.
Reason 2 – Meditation Can Help You Lower Your Blood Pressure
I personally have experienced the effect meditation can have on your blood pressure. Many a time I have gone without meditating for a number of days and my blood pressure has slowly crept up. I have done many experiments with my blood pressure and meditation and this is one I encourage you to try. I simply bought an electronic blood pressure machine which you can buy from a pharmacist or chemist for about $200 Australian. I first checked my blood pressure to find out what it currently is. I then dd 20 minutes of meditation and checked it again. I found that both my blood pressure and my heart rate had dropped by up to 30%. I have also tried doing the same exercise but instead of meditating, I just sit for 20 minutes and relaxing but I have found I do not get anywhere near the same improvement. Generally I would only see about 5 to 10% improvements.
I have seen many research documentaries that have illustrated in a practical way how simply using basic meditation techniques can decrease your blood pressure and your heart rate. Visit your local library and check out the books and research they have on meditation. You will be surprised how many doctors now encourage their patients to learn meditation. My GP (General Practitioner) and his wife actually run guided courses on meditation.
Reason 3 – Meditation Can Help With Creativity
There is a lot of who do about meditation and a lot of people call themselves meditation experts. Honestly, I do not buy into that for one simple reason. Meditation is about you. When you are meditating there will be no one else in your head except for you, so in the end you are the expert of your own meditation techniques. However, I will say that there are many people who can help you in learning meditation but ultimately, if you are listening to them while you are meditating you are not focusing on your inner self but on your outer self.
I have been told that I am one of the most prolific writers out there. It is normal for me to sit down in the morning and by the afternoon I will have belted out 5 to 10 articles of 1,000 to 2,000 words and my editors would not print my material if it was not of excellent quality. One of the reasons I believe I am able to achieve this, is because of my meditation regime. When I have completed my meditation, my mind is free of stress which really opens my creativity. I just like many writers suffer, what we like to call, “Writers block”. Often this is caused simply because of the chaos of the information in our head.
If I have a situation where writers block is really setting in, I simply stop, head to my meditation area for 20 minutes and once I am finished, I will always have a swirl of great ideas to complete my material. One thing to note though, I have found that Baroque Music at 60 beats a minute, works best for getting that creativity flowing. I prefer this style of meditation music, over tranquil water flowing or the sounds of the open bush simply because the 60 beats a minute, helps release far more alpha waves in my brain.
To give you an idea of how powerful Baroque Meditation music at 60 beat a minute can be, the Coca Cola Retail Research Council found that relaxed customers would in fact purchase 38% more than those who were not relaxed.
Reason 4 – Meditation Can Help With Learning
If meditation can help with creativity then it also stands to reason that mediation music can help with learning. In particular Baroque Meditation music makes the perfect background for all training and learning environments from pre-school to government “think tanks.” In fact it is used in schools all over Australia. A quote from the teacher of a remedial class here in Australia: “It seems to slow them down so they can think.”
Corporate trainers can improve the effectiveness of training sessions dramatically. A colleague uses the baroque meditation music as background for his memory. In fact I have been using Baroque Meditation Music in some of our computer sessions and I have seen dramatic improvements in the way people cope with our technical training.
Look, the days of meditation being only for the hippies or eastern religions like Buddhism are over. Anyone who has ever tried meditation will tell you that you certainly will feel a sense of calm and as you become more proficient you will find your ability to copy, be creative and learn more will be improved. The challenge that most people fear with meditation is that they will look foolish or their peers might think less of you but in all honesty, you maybe surprised to find out that the people you think will look on you as foolish are in fact the ones using meditation daily.
All I want to do is to encourage you to give meditation a try. What have you got to loose but just 20 minutes of your time and imagine what you might gain? To finish off I want to take a moment to simply reiterate the four reasons why you should consider learning to meditate:
Reason 1 – Meditation Will Assist You In Calming
Reason 2 – Meditation Can Help You Lower Your Blood Pressure
Reason 3 – Meditation Can Help With Creativity
Reason 4 – Meditation Can Help With Learning