A relaxed state offers immense benefits to the mind, body, and soul. It makes your mind sharper and enhances memory and learning abilities. Relaxation calms the soul, which puts you in touch with your spiritual side and increases your self-awareness. For many people, this is the height of intentional living.
Through relaxation, the body is less vulnerable to diseases and recovers faster when injured. It’s even used by sportspeople to help build physical endurance.
However, achieving relaxation is not such a simple task. It has to be approached deliberately, and one of the best ways you can do that is through meditation.
Meditation
Meditation has an ancient and mystic tradition. Primarily, it was used by religious groups as they would lock themselves away in their temples, monasteries, and convents. With time, however, the general population caught onto this beneficial practice.
Contrary to beliefs, meditation is a state of focused thought. A person meditating seems to have blanked out their mind. In truth, that person has excluded every other thought and sensation and deliberately focused their mind on a single point. Samvara Spiritual Teacher can explain this in a better way.
Why Meditate?
As noted previously, meditation offers a host of benefits to the mind, body, and soul in the following specific ways:
- Meditation helps build stamina for both the body and the mind. By calming your mind, your brain is better able to cope with the stresses on its neurons. When your brain is quiet, the production of various hormones responsible for metabolic function is optimised. These factors enhance your body’s ability to deal with fatigue and pain. Also, your body can regenerate faster in case of injury or illness, which is excellent for athletes and the elderly.
- Many chronic illnesses are caused or worsened by stress. Meditation works wonderfully to combat stress, making it beneficial for anxiety, asthma, heart diseases, cancer, depression, sleep problems and tensional headaches.
- Do you wish to get along better with other people? Meditation is the key to healthier, more wholesome, and fulfilling relationships. If you are calm, you will arouse similar feelings with those you interact with. That is the case with happiness. Those you engage with always try to mirror the emotions you project. Also, you are less likely to overreact to stressful conditions, which is vital in deescalating situations. Furthermore, kindness to others is kindness to yourself. Intentional kindness is, in fact, a form of meditation.
- Meditation helps bring you closer to your spiritual self. By intentionally discovering your various levels of consciousness, you understand yourself better. You face your fears and confront your limits. You become more than the total sum of your component elements.
Types of Meditation
There are various ways of achieving relaxation via meditation. Many techniques target either the body, mind, or soul. Others go for a holistic influence. Broadly they can be divided into the following:
- Visualisation – Here, you form mental images of places, things, or situations you find calming and focus on them.
- Mindful meditation – You immerse yourself in the present, focusing on sensations, thoughts, and body processes, gaining a greater awareness of yourself.
- Transcendental meditation – A technique created by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi where the repetition of a mantra achieves profound relaxation.
- Tai Chi – A form of meditation effected through the repetition of a series of body movements. It is Chinese in origin.
Conclusion
Meditation is an effective way of achieving relaxation. Its benefits are all-encompassing, and it can be practised by anyone anywhere. If you do not already do it, then now is an excellent time to start. Even just 10 minutes a day is enough to start seeing some benefits.
