What is meditation?
Meditation is great for stress management. Remember stress occurs in your mind and that doesn't make it less real. It means your mind is the key to remove stress from your life. You will experience, relaxation, increased awareness, mental focus, clarity and a sense of peace if meditation is practiced regularly.
"Meditation is one of the most natural and yet most profoundly rewarding of all human activities. It connects you with your own inner powers of vitality, clarity, and love. When done deeply, it also connects you with God and His infinite joy." Put simply, meditation is the method of bringing a scattered, disorganised mind into a state of peace, quiet and tranquillity.
The word meditation, is derived from two Latin words meditari and mederi (to heal). Its Sanskrit derivation 'medha' means wisdom. An ordinary person may consider meditation as a worship or prayer. But it is not so. A focus is used, such as a candle flame, a Manthra or the rhythm of the natural breath. The mind will go out again and again, but the meditator gently brings it back to the subject of concentration. Thus, Meditation means awareness. Whatever you do with awareness is meditation. "Watching your breath" is meditation; listening to the birds is meditation. As long as these activities are free from any other distraction to the mind, it is effective meditation.
Different Meditation Techniques:
* Controlled focus:
Classic examples of concentration or controlled focus are found in the revered traditions of Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, Qiqong, Yoga and Vedanta, though many methods involve attempts to control or direct the mind. Attention is focused on an object of meditation--such as one's breath, an idea or image, or an emotion. Brain waves recorded during these practices are typically in the gamma frequency (20-50 Hz), seen whenever you concentrate or during "active" cognitive processing.
* Open monitoring:
These mindfulness type practices, common in Vipassana and Zazen, involve watching or actively paying attention to experiences--without judging, reacting or holding on. Open monitoring gives rise to frontal theta (4-8 Hz), an EEG pattern commonly seen during memory tasks or reflection on mental concepts.
* Automatic self-transcending:
This category describes practices designed to go beyond their own mental activity--enabling the mind to spontaneously transcend the process of meditation itself. Whereas concentration and open monitoring require degrees of effort or directed focus to sustain the activity of meditation, this approach is effortless because there is no attempt to direct attention--no controlled cognitive processing. An example is the Transcendental Meditation technique. The EEG pattern of this category is frontal alpha coherence, associated with a distinct state of relaxed inner wakefulness.
Some techniques may fall under more than one category: Guided meditation is controlled focus if the instruction is, "Hold attention on your breath." But if the instructor says, "Now just watch your thoughts, letting them come and go," then you're probably doing open monitoring--and your EEG would say for sure.
Without the scientific research (or until we have a cell phone app for measuring our EEG and biochemistry), meditative states and their effects remain subjective. Brain research, along with findings on psychological and behavioral effects, gives a more objective framework for health professionals or anyone to determine which meditation technique might be most beneficial for a given purpose.
Kind regards
Mr. Healthy Mindfullness
