Seeds of Insight 015 - Why meditate?
Dear You,
Friends and yoga students often share with me that they would love to build a meditation habit, but they find it difficult. Indeed, meditation takes commitment and for many of us, it is uncomfortable to begin with. I find that deep motivation comes with understanding why we do it. Today’s Seeds of Insight is dedicated to this question.
We meditate to still our mind and move in the direction of rest and focus. In an age of multitasking, digital overstimulation, stress and noise, meditation allows us to stop. Multitasking has been shown to impair cognitive skills (attention, processing speed, memory, logic, reasoning). Digital multitasking has been unsurprisingly shown to have negative long term effects on mental health, emotional regulation and sleep.
Meditation counterbalances these trends. Learning to still and focus our mind has been shown to increase our capacity to solve problems, abide in peace, handle stress and work productively. And if this is not enough for you, check this out: there is a growing body of scientific research pointing to physiological changes due to consistent meditation practice. Meditation increases the cortical thickness in the hippocampus, which runs our memory as well as the ability to learn new things. The amygdala (our fight or flight response centre) is shown to be reduced in meditators compared to non-meditators. Long term meditators are therefore less reactive and more efficient decision makers.
We meditate to restore balance. Mindfulness-based methods, including meditation and gentle yoga, have been shown to nearly halve the relapse rate in people with recurrent depression and offer sustainable long-term support to a range of mental and physical illnesses. It works - I don’t think we can safely say the same about antidepressants or psychotherapy.
We meditate to heal. Meditation helps us process negative emotions, such as grief, anger and fear. Consciously or subconsciously, we often spend our lives trying to escape them, yet if we’ve tried this strategy for a long time, we would know it doesn’t work. The only way is through as they say, and that means welcoming and experiencing those feelings completely. Meditation cultivates stillness of body and mind so that we can meet emotions and trauma with compassion for ourselves and for all the different aspects of our being, including the ‘monster in the closet’.
We meditate to fulfil our innermost purpose. Rod Stryker, author of “The Four Desires” says that we all come to life with a unique soul purpose. True fulfilment is found when we discover it and align our lives with it. Yet, “under ordinary circumstances, your mind is less than ideally suited to “hear” your soul”, he writes. Therefore, to access our own inner wisdom, we need to train our mind to be still.
We meditate to serve from a place of never-ending fullness. Matthiew Ricard, a Buddhist monk, researcher on the effects of meditation on the brain and author of “Why we meditate?”, writes “The Ultimate reason for meditation is to transform ourselves in order to be better able to transform the world. To put it another way, we transform ourselves so that we become better human beings and serve others in wiser and more effective way. Meditation thus gives our lives the noblest possible meaning”.
Finally, we meditate to be free. This comes last, but it really is the only true and underlying reason to meditate, at least for me. Papaji says that the purpose of all practices is Silence and this Silence- Awareness - Bliss is our very Nature. It is ever present, yet difficult to see as it is covered by the clutter of our own mind and the resulting suffering. We meditate to remove this clutter and inquire deeply into the source of our suffering. It is my personal motivation to sit quiet every day. Nothing is of greater priority.
So find your own unique reason, connect to it and let it guide you. Despite everything good that I knew about meditation, it seemed that I needed to FEEL and KNOW my own reason. So may you uncover yours and practice with joy! If it doesn’t come immediately, don’t worry, don’t force it. It will come in its own time, if it is needed.
Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti!
With love,
Iri
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