8 Benefits of Meditation
8 benefits of meditation: Meditation is a mindfulness practice that grows in popularity yearly in the West. But for those living in Eastern cultures, meditation is part of their daily lives from a young age.
Many people think yoga is about flexibility, but my answer is that yoga isn’t about the flexibility of your body but your mind. And this all starts with meditation.
So why meditate? Here are 8 benefits of meditation:
Meditation offers numerous benefits for both mental and physical well-being. Regular practice can help reduce stress and anxiety by calming the mind and promoting relaxation
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Quiet your mind
Meditation encourages you to have a single point of focus… which, over time, quiets your mind both when you’re meditating and when you’re not. The time you dedicate to meditation can spill over into your everyday life.
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Enhance self-awareness
Self-awareness is a personal thing, and it’s different for every person. Self-awareness is about our perceptions of ourselves and the world and how they align with our internal standards. High levels of self-awareness enable us to understand others’ perceptions of us, manage our emotions, objectively evaluate ourselves, and align with our values.
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Cultivate calmness
Meditation is an opportunity to pause, to connect with ourselves, and to disconnect from others and the outside world. Whether you meditate for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or longer, you cultivate calm, but it doesn’t end there.
The feeling we get as we meditate becomes something we want to invite into our lives more often. We invite and seek out those feelings of calm in more moments of our lives.
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Connection with self and others
A gift of meditation is the greater connection we feel with ourselves. The inner warmth and gratitude we cultivate for ourselves as we meditate translates into our relationships and connections with others.
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Reduce stress (main in 8 benefits of meditation)
The moments of stillness and silence we feel in meditation can reduce when and how we feel stress. The calmness we cultivate as we meditate often creates a ripple effect that spills over into other aspects of our lives and can reduce our stress levels.
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Help manage anxiety
Anxiety is one of the most common mental health conditions and is related to a fear of the future. In 2020, this is something more people have experienced due to the uncertainty of lockdown and what may or may not happen in the future.
Meditation brings you into the present, allowing you to focus on your breath and the moment. These moments of pause can infiltrate other aspects of your life as you meditate.
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Improve concentration
Clearing some of the chatter in our minds and taking moments of pause as we meditate can improve our concentration.
If you’ve ever experienced “brain fog,” you’ll likely relate to this. A benefit of meditating is the potential lifting of this fog, which can translate into improved concentration. The more you meditate, the more you can gradually feel this lifting.
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Improve mental health
The seven previous benefits can all combine to help improve your overall mental health. Cultivating a regular meditation practice can benefit your mental health in more ways than one, so start small, stay consistent and feel and observe the changes and stillness as you stick with it.
I’d love to hear how you feel meditation benefits you. Leave your comments below!
Learn more about meditation in our 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training course