Meditation for You

Lighten up! Perhaps you have noticed that non stop thinking and worrying generate a kind of inner fears feed on one another, problems get magnified exponentially, and the next thing you know, you are feeling overwhelmed and panicked.

Meditation encourages an inner mental spaciousness in which difficulties and concerns no longer seem so threatening. It seems like constructive solutions can naturally arise as well as a certain detachment that allows for greater objectivity, perspective, and humor. That mysterious word enlightenment actually refers to the supreme "lightening up"!

Here are some other benefits you can experience from practicing meditation:

• Experiencing focus and flow - When you are so fully involved in an activity that all sense of self-consciousness, separation, and distraction dissolves. For human beings, this total immersion constitutes the ultimate enjoyment and provides the ultimate antidote to alienation of post modern life. There is no doubt you have experienced moments like these; reading, playing a sport, creating a work of art, working in the garden, making love. Athletes refer to this as "the zone." Through meditation, you can discover how to give the same focused attention to and derive the same enjoyment from every activity.
• Feeling more centered, grounded, and balanced - To counter the growing insecurity of life in rapidly changing times, meditation offers an inner grounded ness and balance that external situations cannot interfere. When you practice coming home over and over to your body, your breath, your sensations, your feelings, you eventually grow to realize that you are always home, no matter where you go. And when you make friends with yourself, embracing the dark and the light, the weak and the strong, you no longer get thrown off-center by the "slings and arrows" of life.
• Enhancing performance at work and play - Researches have shown that basic meditation practice alone can enhance clarity, creativity, self-actualization, and many of the other factors that contribute to superior performance. In addition, specific meditations have been devised to enhance performance in a variety of activities, from sports to schoolwork.
• Increasing appreciation, gratitude, and love - As you begin to open to your experience without judgment or hatred, your heart gradually opens as well, to yourself and others. You can practice specific types of meditations for cultivating appreciation, gratitude, and love or you may find, as so many meditators have before you, that these qualities take place naturally when you can gaze at the world with fresh eyes, free from the usual projections and expectations.