By. Dr. Rachel Greenberg
1. Meditation soothes your nervous system. AKA it helps to manage stress. Meditation helps elicit the parasympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system, which is the part of the system that tells us it’s okay to rest and digest. It’s our bodies way of knowing it can relax. That there’s no threat, and that stillness won’t jeopardize survival. In the face of endless stressors, meditation can help us achieve a soothing that our systems need to function with balance. When our nervous system is over-stimulated, it can have unwanted and unpleasant health consequences, and so meditation can help us tend to our health in this very important way.
2. It helps us better understand ourselves. With the incessant distractions that we’re bombarded with nearly every waking moment, we can become detached from who we are, what we’re experiencing, what we need, what we’re feeling, why we’re experiencing what we are internally. Often times we don’t slow down enough to consider that we have the ability to cultivate a better understanding of who we are, what we’re going through, and what that’s telling us about what we should, can, or need to do. We’re always doing, doing, doing, doing, and meditation helps us achieve a state of being. A state of being allows us to check-in with ourselves. It’s a way to say to yourself, “Hey! Take a minute, will ya? I want to know you because the better I do, the more I can help you get what you most want in your relationships and in your life.”
3. It gives us distance from internal realities that we can become too enmeshed with. As we achieve a greater sense of self-understanding and self-discovery, we are able to begin to notice the things happening for us that we have unconsciously become enmeshed with, or overly attached to. Meditation can help us shift the script from an enmeshed stance (“I’m just an anxious person”) to a more distanced stance (“I’m experiencing an anxious thought right now”). This type of shift, getting distance from our thoughts and feelings, once we understand what it is, helps liberate us from emotions that aren’t pleasant, or are contributing to our behavior in detrimental ways. If you’ve been carrying around the belief that you’re just an anxious person, there’s a great deal of power lost inherently in that. It’s a resignation. Meditation allows us to start to be with our experiences curiously, and notice the ways in which our emotional landscape changes often, regularly, reliably. You might experience anxiety physiologically (rapid heart rate, pit in stomach, sweaty palms, shallow breathing, restless body) and cognitively (ruminative thoughts about what horrific catastrophic thing may happen) but meditation allows you to label that as an experience you’re having internally, an emotional state. It’s important that becomes distinguished from a stable trait of your character and who you innately are. This discernment helps the internal experience become less impactful and you become more free from it. Meditation helps us achieve this.
4. It promotes emotional regulation. When we aren’t conscious of what we’re feeling, we can react to any slight, or unpleasant emotion, or trigger we experience in a way that can become dysregulated and can have seriously negative impacts on our relationships (at work, home, on the road, anywhere, everywhere). Meditation can help make us more patient, compassionate, tolerant, and confident. It gives us the chance to be with the intimate needs of others, as well as our own needs, and it makes it easier for us to give strangers the benefit of the doubt. Overall, meditation gives us the opportunity to take a beat, a pause, a moment or more to regulate before automatically reacting from a place in us that’s been triggered. This doesn’t mean we haven’t been hurt, or aren’t angry, or don’t need to share something conflicted, it only means that now we’re able to do this with more care. It’s a response now, instead of a reaction. This enables others to hear the message we’re relaying without becoming defensive against it, and this enhances our relationships while simultaneously getting our needs met. We don’t have to sacrifice ourselves and neither do those we’re in relationship with. It’s a win/win each and every time.
5. It enhances our focus. Meditation is essentially a concentration practice. It’s a deliberate and direct connecting our attention to what’s happening for us in the moment. Regardless of the type specific type of meditation you’re doing, you’re cultivating a focused stance, honing in on something specific that you’re intentionally tracking and staying connected to. This can be extremely challenging! But, the practice itself is one that elicits a skill that generalizes beyond the sitting. Once we learn through meditation how to generate a focused and deliberate concentration on a task, we’re better able to implement this in other important areas of our life. It’s a muscle we build, a skill that serves us well beyond the cushion (or office chair, or driver’s seat of car, or wherever you find the space to meditate).
6. It feels good. Meditation feels like a little nap our spirits take whenever we need a reprieve. It’s a remarkable, easy way to escape the daily grind, and to give ourselves even just a few minutes to close our eyes (something we SO RARELY DO!), rest our bodies, let our spirits settle. This FEELS GOOD. We all need to quiet down the monkey bouncing around like a lunatic in our minds. It feels good when that monkey chills out and settles down.
7. It empowers us to take the driver’s seat in our lives. Meditation is a practice that fosters an attitudinal stance. It’s a way we take care of ourselves, take the power back in our lives from difficult experiences, unwanted conflicts, painful emotions, losses or changes, or circumstances outside of our control. Meditation helps us decide to take care of ourselves by training our minds instead of allowing our minds to drag us along. Meditation helps us become free.
If you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of meditation, mindfulness, or how to develop an awareness practice, contact me directly at drrlgreenberg@gmail.com or direct message on instagram @dr.rachellalan
