As one year draws to a close and a new beginning dawns, many people make health and lifestyle pledges. Surprisingly, despite strong convictions, only 8% of those who make new year’s resolutions, actually keep them. Meditation can help us focus on our convictions, helping us to follow through with our best laid plans. Why do those who meditate feel that it is such an important part of their life? Here we look at 5 reasons to meditate and examine why they have become so popular.
5 Reasons to meditate
Increase Productivity/Creativity
This is one of the more interesting reasons to meditate. Some of the most successful people attribute their success to meditation. The late Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, talked talked shortly before his death about how he had meditated during his career. Here’s a quote from Jobs, via inc.com
If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things–that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. – Steve Jobs.
Jobs may have been a little ahead of his time in more than electronics. Today, many global businesses encourage their workers to spend a little time focusing their minds. Companies who encourage meditation of some sort include:
- Apple
- Prentice Hall Publishing
- HBO
- Nike
- AOL Time Warner
- Yahoo
- Deutsche Bank
- Proctor & Gamble
Meditation increases innovation and motivation, by reducing cluttered thinking and procrastination. If ever we needed good reasons to meditate, this is surely one of them.
Healthy Mind, Healthy Body
Meditation is like a health tonic for the mind. But now science is suggesting there are benefits for our bodies too. Deepak Chopra and others believe in a strong mind-body relationship, which can be harnessed as a viable form of healthcare.
Think about it, if we have to walk around a town or an office building we don’t really feel any differently afterwards. But if we walk on a beach, where we are in a wide open space, which allows our minds to relax, we feel calm and reinvigorated. Why is this? It might not be all about the fresh air. Walking in places where we have the freedom to switch off is a great form of meditation, and helps us boost that mind-body relationship.
Stress Relief
One of the main reasons to meditate for many people is to relieve stress, or to prevent stress building up in the first place. If we have a busy schedule, we may not even notice that we are stressed. Some people like to be ‘on the go’ all the time, which is great. But using meditation could mean that our busy lifestyles are a little more enjoyable while we are ‘on the go’. Who wouldn’t want that?
While the benefits of meditation have been commonly known for some time, neuroscience developments have now proven that meditation lowers stress.
Relationships
Making time to relax through meditation, is a great way of making ourselves more available to those closest to us. There is a difference between actually hearing and understanding the feelings that are being conveyed to us, and simply hearing words while our focus and concentration are elsewhere.
Many relationships break down due to a lack of communication. Not due a lack of words, but a lack of understanding and processing of communication. Better relationships can be forged if we are focused on each other, meaning we are fully available.
The art of listening will make you a great friend to have. Busy minds, where constant internal chatter and stress are rife, generally don’t have much time or space for others. So meditation not only benefits us; but it also has a positive impact on those around us, via our relationships with them.
Enjoy the Silence
Have you ever had a song ‘stuck in your head’? Or maybe it is a word, phrase or simply an annoying thought or opinion that crops up too often. Do simple things cause you to become frustrated? Everybody in one way or another experiences this (although most people won’t admit to it).
Learning that we can take control and chose the thoughts that we have is a revelation. Simple meditation can eradicate the silly thoughts which take up our head space. This head space can then be repopulated with more enjoyable/relevant/positive thoughts. Meditation brings peace to the mind, making this one of the best reasons to meditate.
If you find it difficult to start meditating, have a look at The Paris Method, a simple 5 step practice which makes it easier to get to the place where you can enjoy the benefits of meditation.