Meditation: Reasons why mind over matter, matters

Meditation is an ancient discipline that is allowing human beings worldwide to fight stress, anxiety, and depression on the rise in modern society today. Meditation allows the individual to gain control over his/her mind by focusing on the present moment.

Through wide-ranging techniques and exercises, meditation allows the human mind to enter a state of awareness by letting go of what has happened in the unchangeable past and what may happen in the unpredictable future.

Jaggi Vasudev a.k.a. Sadhguru, an Indian yogi and mystic, describes meditation as inner engineering that allows the mind “freedom from stress, tension, and anxiety.” True health, according to Vasudev, is only possible when the individual is in tune with nature—both inner and outer.

1. Learning to train the monkey brain

A common misconception about meditation is that it’s about emptying your mind of thought and trying to find focus. According to Buddhist Master Mingyur Rinpoche, thought and emotion are important ingredients to meditate. Rinpoche calls the mind a “monkey brain” that is filled with relentless chatter of emotions such as anger, jealousy, or insecurity. In order to calm the monkey brain down Rinpoche says we need to give the mind a task.

For example, giving the mind a task of being aware of the breath, distracts it from running into uncontrollable directions. Thoughts and emotions will still continue to enter the mind—however let them play in the background while focusing on breathing in and breathing out. This simple exercise can allow anyone to meditate for any duration of time—whether it’s 5-minutes while they drink coffee or for 20-minutes while traveling in a train to work.

2. Using technology to meditate

Streaming social media, online news, and Netflix on your smartphone is what you do. It’s what everyone does when the TV is on and the laptop’s open for work. Science is going on to prove how digital noise is responsible for short attention spans, which have dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in 2013. Meanwhile Goldfish can hold a thought for 9 seconds.

The reason why digital has entered every aspect of our life is what makes it practical while meditating. Apps like Buddhify and Headspace help make meditation simple-stupid, easy to customize, easier to monitor results of, and to carry.

For example, in one of its videos, Headspace compares thoughts traveling through the human mind to traffic moving to-and-fro on a busy highway. The mediator must focus his/her attention on simply observing the traffic like a bystander—rather than getting caught up with the noise of the vehicles on the road, thinking about how crowded the streets might be, or following any specific car.

3. What does ‘mindfulness’ really mean?

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the mindfulness-based stress reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, describes mindfulness as “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.”

Kabat-Zinn says that we all take ourselves too seriously. We become the central star of films playing in our mind with everyone else playing insignificant roles. This obsession with “me” does not allow us to have true knowledge of who or what we really are—is it our name, our genetics, the thoughts we think, or the food we eat? Simply asking this question about the nature of the self is the first step toward mindfulness.

Being mindful during breathing is not about being aware that ‘you’ are inhaling and exhaling oxygen. Kabat-Zinn says that if breathing was left to the human mind to monitor, it would easily get distracted and we would die. Being aware of the breath is about observing the sensations of your body as it rises and falls when you breathe in and breathe out. It’s about noticing how your chest expands as it fills with oxygen and contracts soon after. It’s about being aware of when your mind wanders away to chase a thought, and bringing it back to focus without judging yourself.

4. How meditation can change our brain?

Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School has studied the impact of meditation on the human brain and why it is associated with better quality of life, happiness, low levels of stress, the ability to fight depression, and eat and sleep better.

In one study, Lazar found that the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which shrinks as human beings age, had the same amount of gray matter in 50-year-olds who meditated regularly as found in 25-year-olds. In another study, she has proven a direct correlation between meditation and cortical thickness, responsible for an individual’s working memory and the ability to make executive decisions.

Lazar put human subjects through a mindfulness-based stress reduction program for eight weeks, during which they were told to meditate for 40-minutes a day.  While her subjects meditated with varying levels of discipline—some every day while others only few times a week—they all registered a change in brain volume and activity. She used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to map differences in four different areas of the cortex—responsible for managing emotions better, developing the ability to empathize with others, managing stress with ease, and finding the ability to fight anxiety and fear.

5. How meditation can change our lives?

While you may think of meditation as a lonely process that involves going into a quiet room and locking yourself up to shut out the rest of the world—this exercise allows individuals to feel more connected, less isolated, and more compassionate.

Meditation also allows people and society to find happiness. As the brain activity on the left side of the prefrontal cortex increases, positive emotions increase, allowing the individual to feel more content. Oftentimes in life, we cannot control what happens to us, but we can always control our reaction to specific events. Meditation allows the individual to become more accepting of change. Even patients of diseases like multiple sclerosis, individuals that have suffered years of substance abuse, or the permanent loss of a limb—have relied on meditation to fight through these life-changing circumstances.

In a study published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 40 of 60 high blood pressure patients stopped taking their blood pressure medication after starting meditation. Studies have also found that an individual’s telomeres (caps on chromosomes that help determine the biological age of a person) increased in length if they meditated.

Science is proving the positive health benefits of meditation every day, yet we still complain that we don’t have the time for it. Teenagers today spend close to 9 hours a day on social media. 30 percent of this time is spent entirely on the Internet. It would be awesome if meditation were a pill that we could easily pop to solve our problems. But, if 10-minutes of meditation can truly transform our life—we must think about why we are still making excuses.