Benefits of Meditation

What Is Meditation?

Meditation encompasses many techniques, perhaps most commonly centered on mindfulness and awareness. These two elements — resting the mind and examining the nature of whatever arises — are the basis of all Buddhist meditation practices.

Additionally, we can find healing through meditation in many ways. There are meditation practices that can help us manage daily stress and anxiety. Some meditations can help us work with physical and emotional pain, like the body scan, or bring the whole body to bear, as in walking meditation; quiet the mind and promote relaxation, as in shamatha, or mindfulness meditation; and others that enhance empathy and compassion, like loving-kindness or metta meditation.

Meditation Benefits

Relieve Stress and Anxiety

Meditation can calm an excited mind, relieving stress and anxiety while relaxing the body. Meditation master Ajahn Chah once put it: “As you meditate, your mind will get quieter and quieter, like a still forest pool. Many wonderful and rare animals will come to drink at the pool, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha.”

Slow Breathing, Lower Heart Rate & Blood Pressure, and Mitigate Illness

Along with its efficacy in managing stress and anxiety, meditation is well known for its positive effects on breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure. As the Mayo Clinic asserts (along with others in the medical field), it can help manage symptoms of cancer, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, tension headaches, and more.

Manage Pain

Studies suggest that meditation may help reduce pain, fatigue, and stress in people with chronic pain. By bringing a healthy awareness to our physical or emotional pains, meditation shines a light on what makes us feel stressed, strained, or vulnerable so that we can address it directly and also notice that it, too, is of the nature to change. This makes our pains feel less monolithic and unworkable.

Sleep Better

According to a study published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, “mindfulness meditation may be effective in treating some aspects of sleep disturbance,” which affects an estimated 10–25% of the general population. Such sleep disturbance can contribute to mood and anxiety disorders, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular disease, and other conditions.

Many of meditation’s other benefits contribute to better sleep as well: a slower heart rate lowers the body’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and reducing stress during waking hours helps one enter and maintain the sleep state more easily.

Related: What To Do When You Can’t Sleep · 5 Breathing Meditations · How to Practice Deep Relaxation

Focus on the Present Moment

Meditation is a method for seeing more clearly. It involves allowing our routine ruminations on the past or fantasies about the future to fall away as we attend to the present moment instead. In so doing, we train our minds to relent in their usual preoccupations and rest in the spaciousness of the present moment.

Develop Mindfulness & Insight

For millennia, meditation has been recognized as a tool for developing insight into the true nature of reality. Meditation fosters awareness, or mindfulness, which can help one cut through unhelpful misconceptions and encourage a more open, compassionate relationship with oneself and others. With continued practice, it can take us further to see into the very nature of mind and reality.

Cultivate Positive Qualities

Additionally, we might meditate to cultivate certain positive traits specifically. Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, for example, lists five key qualities that emerge through meditation practice: steadfastness, clear seeing, courage, attention, and an easeful feeling of “no big deal,” where perhaps that might not have been the case for you previously. Meditation can improve our attention, resilience, compassion, and relationships.

Reduce Negative Qualities

Just as meditation fosters positive qualities, it deemphasizes negative ones: when we give our energy and attention to what’s healthy or helpful, we don’t merely strengthen our positive capacities. We become more invested in them, and our clearer seeing helps us better perceive our negative capacities so we can work to mitigate them. For example, meditation helps us to “slow down,” see our anxiety and cultivate stillness in response. Then, through the increased awareness that comes with meditation, we might notice how often our impatience, for example, complicates things or works against our positive efforts — and can recalibrate our efforts to guard against that from happening.

How to Meditate

You can begin to meditate in many ways and practice different types of meditation. However, for those wondering how to get started with meditation, here is a step-by-step guide for basic but effective mindfulness meditation:

1. Take your seat. Sit cross-legged and upright on a meditation cushion or straight-backed chair with your feet flat on the floor. Try not to lean against the back of the chair.
2. Find your sitting posture. Place your hands palms down on your thighs and sit upright with a straight back — relaxed yet dignified. With your eyes open, let your gaze rest comfortably as you look slightly downward about six feet in front of you.
3. Notice and follow your breath. Focus lightly on your out-breath while remaining aware of your environment. Be with each breath as the air goes through your mouth and nostrils and dissolves into the space around you.
4. At the end of each out-breath, rest until the next in-breath naturally begins. For a more focused meditation, try following both the out-breaths and in-breaths.
5. Note the thoughts and feelings that arise. Whenever you notice that a thought, feeling, or perception has taken your attention away from the breath, just say to yourself, “Thinking,” and return to following the breath. There is no need to judge yourself when this happens; just gently note it and attend to your breath and posture.
6. End your session. After the allotted time, you can consider your meditation practice period over. But there’s no need to give up any sense of calm, mindfulness, or openness you’ve experienced. See if you can consciously allow these to remain present throughout your day.

Congratulations, you’ve just meditated!