Benefits of Meditation
We’ve all heard that meditation is good for us, but my 1,000+ straight days of practice have shown me its power. Meditation creates space between your thoughts and actions, allowing you to respond, rather than react. When we react, we’re acting on autopilot. It’s an automatic emotional reaction to outer stimulus, whereas when we respond, we have put some thought and intention into what we want our action to be.
This means that we’re able to think more strategically and produce different outcomes rather than repeating our past patterns and receiving the same results in life. If you are always overeating, or reaching for that delicious bag of chips, meditation will help you create the space to recognize your patterns and do things differently.
Meditation allows you to witness your thoughts simply as thoughts, providing a higher level understanding of your life and behaviors, rather than always feeling caught up in the moment. It allows you to change the way you show up in the world to something that feels more authentic and true to you.
Physiologically, meditation, especially a regular practice, deactivates your sympathetic nervous system and activates your parasympathetic system. Your sympathetic nervous system responds to stress or dangers in your life and puts your body into fight or flight mode, that almost panicked feeling. When we were cave people, these dangers were very real and imminent. Now in our instant society, these dangers include constant notifications, worrying that people don’t like us, and other perceived threats to our well-being, causing us to be in a constant state of stress.
The parasympathetic nervous system is all about rest and relaxation. It puts the body into a mode of recovery, bringing with it a sense of peace and ease. Over time, this can look like a decrease in stress, anxiety, depression, and pain, and in the moment in can bring an instant sense of peace and relief.
If you’d like to begin a practice, check out this simple beginner’s meditation, and learn more about how to get started here. There are an endless amount of different meditations to try, each evoking a different set of feelings, so get curious and start exploring to connect with a practice that works for you.