What Are Meditation and Yoga Benefits?

In recent years, the practices of meditation and yoga have become increasingly popular. Regardless of how many people recommend it, however, there are some who do not believe that there are actual health benefits to these activities. The truth is that there are many meditation and yoga benefits that help with improving both a person's physical and their mental well being.

Meditation is particularly effective for someone who wants to feel better mentally. Many people think negatively about most situations, but they do not think that they can control their thoughts. Yoga teaches people to take control of their thoughts and stop being victims of their own negative thinking. Through meditation, people can learn how to curb their negative thoughts or temporarily shut off their brains completely.

Every day, people are presented with situations that are not such a big deal, but the little annoyances really get under their skin. Meditation can help them learn how to detach themselves from these aggravating situations. Someone who practices meditation does not ignore the long line at the grocery store or the person talking loudly on their cell phone in the waiting room. They simply learn how to put it into perspective and be less bothered by it.

There are many physical benefits to yoga, besides losing weight and staying in shape. Yoga gently stretches out the muscles and joints, therefore ensuring that optimum blood supply make its way to the entire body. In addition, it gently massages organs in the body that would otherwise never be stimulated. This is excellent for detoxifications which can help delay aging and improve energy levels.

Yoga has also been proven to help prevent or control serious health conditions. For example, it lowers blood pressure, which helps prevent hypertension, heart disease and stroke. In addition to the benefits for the heart, yoga can lower cholesterol, which helps prevent many other health problems, and boots the function in the immune system.

Some people still believe that meditation and yoga benefits are new age ideas that have no real physical or mental health value. Research on these practices, however, shows that these people are completely wrong. Meditation can help calm the mind and significantly reduce everyday stress triggers, while yoga can help detoxify the body and prevent serious health conditions. Someone who often feels stressed or would like to feel generally healthier should explore these options to start feeling their best at all times.

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3 Reasons to Use a Self-Healing Meditation

Do you want to take control of your health? Join the club! Many people are actively changing their lifestyles for the better, to boost their health and reduce their dependence on the medical establishment, and for many, self-healing meditation plays an important role in this process. Here we'll take a look at some of the reasons why meditating for better health is a great thing to do.

Firstly, it makes sense because the mind and body are inextricably connected, and your mental state exerts a huge influence over your physical health. Sure, most people depend on drugs and surgery to deal with illness; after all, this approach has the backing of science, and is what just about everybody does. But the fact remains that while such interventions can useful or even essential in some cases, true healing comes from within, and we're all much more powerful than conventional medicine would have us believe. The existence of people who have overcome serious illnesses by using visualisation and similar mind-body techniques is testament to that.

Secondly, it costs nothing to meditate, except some of your time, and possibly a meditation recording if you choose to use one. It's certainly much cheaper to meditate then it is to pay for conventional treatment. Now while you should always follow your doctor's advice, and continue with any necessary medications or other treatment plans for your condition, there's usually no reason why you can't add meditation as part of your healing regime as well. If nothing else, it'll help you feel more relaxed and less stressed, which can in itself have a positive knock-on effect on your general well-being.

Thirdly, a self-healing meditation can be used to great effect by those who are currently healthy, as a preventative measure. Do this and you may be less likely to become ill, because meditation provides an effective way to deal with stress, which underlies many modern illnesses. In addition, you'll gain a great sense of self-empowerment by taking more responsibility for your own health and well-being - which is something that far more people need to do in this era where we're actively encouraged hand over our power to the medical establishment and the big-business pharmaceutical industry.

While there are many health-related meditations available, the most powerful include brainwave entrainment recordings which take your brain down into a delta brainwave state. Delta waves are very low-frequency brain waves which are predominantly produced when we're in deep sleep, and delta wave production is associated with enhanced bodily healing and regeneration. This is partly why getting plenty of sleep of the right type is so important to your health.

Using a suitable brainwave recording can help you to spend more time in the delta state even while you're still awake, thus giving your body an extra chance to boost its healing processes.

You can learn more about the power of such self-healing meditation recordings at my site, and if you should decide to use one for yourself, I recommend checking out the 'Health' recordings from The Unexplainable Store. This is a great site with a reputation for producing top quality products (I've tried and liked them myself), and there are free downloads available as well. For more information just go to http://www.brain-sync.com

Loren Mann is an experienced 'explorer of consciousness' who enjoys writing about self-development topics and sharing helpful, high quality resources, and may receive compensation as a result of making these recommendations.

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4 Easy Relaxation Methods For Deeper Meditation

The key to successful meditation is physical and mental relaxation. How many times have you sat down to meditate, and then got up at the end of your session feeling as if it was a waste of time? Many have this experience, and it's usually because for whatever reason, they've found it difficult to relax properly.

Let's take a look at some simple tips for relaxing your body and mind, so you can get the most from your meditation sessions.

1. A good way to relax your body is to systematically tense and release all of your muscles. Start with your toes, and then tense and relax the muscles in your feet, your calves, thighs, buttocks, abdomen, arms and shoulders and head. You don't have to spend long time on this, but a few minutes spent doing it at the beginning of each session will pay off.

2. Another effective physical relaxation method is to visualise a feeling of warmth and heaviness in your body. Imagine that your flesh is turned into a warm metal, and is becoming progressively heavier and warmer. Start with your limbs, progressing to your torso and head, feeling the heavy, warm sensations flooding over your whole body.

3. The way in which you breathe can also affect your levels of relaxation, and deep, slow breathing is an excellent way to relax naturally. As you begin to meditate, make the effort to breathe fully from your abdomen, drawing in and releasing the breath slowly and smoothly.

4. A fourth method which can help you to relax both physically and mentally, is to listen to a meditation recording. While there's a huge variety available to choose from, the best meditation tracks include brainwave entrainment technologies such as binaural beats.

Such a recording helps to relax your brain by stimulating the production of lower frequency brainwaves than those that are associated with normal waking consciousness. This happens thanks to a phenomenon called the 'frequency following response', where your brain matches its own brainwave output to the frequencies of the sounds on the recording.

Such a recording is useful for new and experienced meditators alike, but is especially valuable for those who normally find it difficult to relax and focus their minds. Use binaural beats, and you're sure to experience the benefits of meditation and deep relaxation more quickly than you would with traditional methods, which can often take months or even years to learn.

If you want to find out what binaural beats or other brainwave entrainment methods can do for you, I highly recommend checking out the 'Meditation' recordings from The Unexplainable Store. These are of great quality and are fully guaranteed, and there are free downloads available too. For more information go to http://www.brain-sync.com

Loren Mann is an experienced 'explorer of consciousness' who enjoys writing about self-development topics and sharing helpful, high quality resources, and may receive compensation as a result of making these recommendations.

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Living and Aging With Meditation

These days, without wishing to sound morbid, living seems to get harder and harder. Over the past 20 years or so, and partly due to incredible advances in the ease of communication, the world seems to be full of famine, disease, environmental breakdown and war. One could be forgiven for thinking that the end is nigh!

As one starts to personalise this state of affairs, one finds oneself out of a job, or simply wondering when their time will come, losing their home and possessions due to the economic crash, or spending much mental time and energy on wondering how to keep afloat.

Things that have been held as absolute truths have been questioned and then dismantled, and when this happens, when all yardsticks by which we measure ourselves have been discredited, we no longer feel we know what is right or correct, and do not know where to go to get the answers we need.

We are encouraged to be positive and reject negativity, to conform to whatever the rules happen to be and accept "spin" as part of everyday life.

All this causes stress and worry, communities fragment as people have to travel to find work, people feel marginalised and lonely, depression, stress and finally stress related diseases begin to take their toll.

Meditation helps to find that inner peace or sense of self. Like all things, it has to be practised regularly, but with practice it becomes easier and as one's experience of meditation increases, finding time to meditate becomes much easier, as we all find the time to do something we enjoy.

In fact, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who had practiced meditation had improved cognitive and behavioural abilities, and lived longer than people who do not meditate.

The study used 73 residents of retirement homes who were over 81 years old. They were randomly split into 4 groups - those who had no treatment, those who underwent training in meditation, a third group who were given mindfulness training in active distinction making and a fourth group who underwent relaxation training.

After 3 years all of the meditation group members were still alive compared to 87.5% for the mindfulness training group and lower rates for the other two groups. In addition, when tested for attributes such as associative learning, cognitive skills, mental health, aging and behavioural flexibility, the meditation group did much better than the other three groups.

The study therefore suggests that if you meditate you will live longer, have better mental capacity and be less prone to mental disease and depression.

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Benefits of Meditation - Happiness

For many people, meditation represents some sort of spiritual experience, or that to meditate you are engaging in some sort of dark art.

It's true, there is a tradition of ancient texts and beliefs that have been passed down the generations which do indeed involve a spiritual path, but during the course of the twentieth century, teachers and researchers in the West have separated meditation from its spiritual origins, to a practical method of assisting with many twenty first century ills, for example, happiness.

Mystics, monks and yogis living simple lives have claimed for thousands of years that meditation makes you happier. This is endorsed by the many thousands of people who practice meditation in the West, and was recently proved in 2003.

MRI technology and brain mapping was used by researchers who found that meditation does, in fact make the practitioner happy. This is because the left prefrontal cortex of the brain was activated with regular meditation. The left prefrontal cortex is the area of the brain associated with positive emotions. The results of the research where published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

In addition, a biotech company took a group of their employees and trained them in meditation over an eight week period, after which it was found that the group had greatly increased left pre frontal activity than a control group who had not had the training - four months after the training was completed, suggested that the effects of meditation are long term.

It was also found that by measuring the amount of antibodies produced in response to an injection of the flu virus. It was found that the greater the activation of the left prefrontal (in other words, the happier they felt), the greater the response from the immune system to the flu injection. So, meditation helps both with your sense of happiness, and also strengthens the immune system.

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Meditation and Cholesterol

It has been proved that high levels of cholesterol can be caused by diet. No surprise there, but did you know high cholesterol levels can also be caused by stress? In today's world it seems everywhere we go we are constantly subject to noise, be it audible - cars, music blaring in shops, machinery at work etc., or subliminal in the form of what we see around us, advertising and TV for example.

It seems today's world is full of distractions competing for our attention, often at the expense of quality family time, or importantly, time simply with ourselves. Add the changing nature of the workplace, the uncertainty of continued employment, those in work having to work harder to stand still, and it's not surprising that today's modern living is responsible for more stress related illnesses than ever before.

There has been a great deal of research conducted on the subject of stress, and it has been found that chronic stress actually increases cholesterol levels. The Journal of Human Stress published a study that proved raised stress levels also raises cholesterol. The study involved 23 individuals suffering from hypercholesterolemia, (very high cholesterol), being divided into two groups, one of 12 and the other of 11.

The group of 12 learnt and practised meditation for 13 months, the group of 11 did not. At the end of the 13 months results were compared and it was found that the group who had not practised meditation had a 5 point reduction in their cholesterol level, whilst those who had been using meditation found that their cholesterol levels had dropped from an average of 254 to 225 - nearly 30 points.

A second study in which 40 female medical students practiced yoga and meditation found their cholesterol levels dropped by an average of 31 points. So what can we conclude here? Well, one of the main benefits of meditation is calm and inner peace - emotional states rarely approached in today's living.

Practiced regularly, and regularly is the operative word here, like anything worth doing it must be done consistently, meditation will relax and calm you. The result of this as you continue to practice is that more and more you can retain this inner peace as you go about your day, thus reducing your overall stress levels.

Meditation should not be used as a substitute for medication, but given that it is safe and free, meditation is a very worthwhile addition to your daily routine.

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Meditation and Empathy

We seem to live in a world that is often dominated by bad news. The media is full of stories of pestilence, crime, war and economic collapse. We are encouraged to conform to the latest celebrity musings and made to feel that we have to look and act in a certain way.

In Britain and elsewhere a blame culture sometimes seems to predominate as we seek to escape responsibility for our actions, and look for scapegoats to justify our own shortcomings, and at the same time no one seems to want to take any notice when we have a problem, in particular large companies whose employees are more interested (understandably) in keeping their jobs than offering any real help or concern.

Wouldn't life be better if everyone could just take a little more time and trouble just to at least listen to whatever others have to say or may think? Wouldn't a more empathetic society be a better society?

Charity, as they say, begins at home. If we want change in society, then we have to engage in society and change ourselves before we can hope to influence others. If we can learn to think of ourselves a little less and others a little bit more, think of the change that could come about!

Well, real change in ourselves is possible.

Psychologist Carl Rogers defined empathy as "both the capacity to sense what the client is feeling and the ability to communicate this sensitivity at a level tuned to the client's emotional state".

Using this definition, a study was published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology that investigated the relationship between meditation and the level of empathy in counsellors.

The study consisted of three groups of students. The first group of 16 were taught meditation, the second group of 12 were volunteers to learn meditation, but were not actually taught it, and the third group of 11 where totally opposed to learning meditation. All groups were checked before the study and again four weeks afterwards.

The study showed that those who had actually learnt meditation were significantly better at empathising than the other 2 groups, who showed no sign of increased empathy at all.

The conclusion of the study was that those who were the least empathetic before the study but the most open to experience, were those who improved the most.

So, if you would like to see a world where people empathise more with others, meditation can certainly help.

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