Breathe deeper: What you need to know about meditation
Katy Perry and Lena Dunham, Anna Dello Russo, and even David Lynch and Jeff Bridges are doing this. You do not need special clothes or high-tech footwear, you don’t need a special place and, in fact, you don’t even need a coach. In addition, no side effects. It is said that meditation is a new yoga (and perhaps even more). Having migrated to our postmodernity from ancient religious practices, attention concentration techniques proved their potential in the area of consciousness training.
Meditation "teaches" the brain to concentrate, cope with stress and anxiety, helps to return a sober look at the world around us. You can be skeptical of meditation and suspect practitioners of sectarianism, or, following thousands of scientists, recognize an effective brain simulator in the new trend and learn from it distracting from painful thoughts about deadline.
What is meditation
The word "meditation" comes from the Latin meditari, which in different contexts means "to ponder", "mentally contemplate", "to produce ideas". The term “meditation” was also used as a translation of the name of Eastern spiritual practices (in Dhyama in Hinduism, and Zen in Buddhism). These concepts have the same meaning: "mentally contemplate," "reflect."
In dictionaries, meditation is defined as a deep reflection on an object or idea, with distraction from external circumstances, elimination of all factors that disperse attention, both external (sound, light) and internal (physical, emotional, intellectual stress). You can find values that are more close to the everyday understanding of meditation, for example, the state of inner concentration or various actions to achieve it.
Meditation techniques are drawn from the arsenal of Eastern religious culture, where concentration techniques were used to transcend the outside world. One of the first references to meditation dates back to the Vedas, the ancient Indian writings of a religious and philosophical nature, which were created from about the XVI to the V century BC. e. In the ancient tradition, the practice of meditation was ritualized, implying the repetition of phrases, often rhythmical, and the adoption of certain poses. Scientists distinguish not only Buddhist and Hindu, but also Christian, Islamic and Taoist traditions of meditation.
How the phenomenon settled down in the West
Meditation as an element of Buddhist practices received discussion in the West already in the Enlightenment, and from the end of the 19th century meditative techniques began to be actively promoted in the West by popular gurus like Swami Vivekananda, friend and like-minded Nikola Tesla. Secular meditation as a western form of Hindu meditative techniques appeared in India in the 1950s and almost immediately penetrated the USA and Europe. By the early 1970s, more than a thousand meditation studies were conducted in English alone.
Secular meditation involves a variety of techniques and, instead of focusing on spiritual growth, offers an emphasis on reducing stress, controlling attention and achieving emotional stability. Currently, meditation is actively used for psychotherapy and psychological training, as well as complementary medicine.
There is a stereotype that to meditate is to sit and do nothing. In fact, this is a thorough and painstaking work with his own psyche and physiology - the same training, only not for the muscles, but for the brain. Two main types of meditation have taken root in the West: transcendental meditation concentrating on a mantra, that is, a word, sound or phrase, repeated out loud or mentally, and mindfulness meditation during which concentration occurs on breathing.
Where did skepticism about meditation come from
Any culture, and especially mass, is formed from trends generated by it, and it is not a secret that these trends are not always friendly with logic. It’s impossible to step on the web without stumbling on articles with headlines like “The influence of moon phases on human destiny”, “How to clean the house of negative energy”, “Top 10 best natural antibiotics”. A fair skepticism on deeply Vedic YouTube tutorials on restoring female energy through love meditation often extends to the perception of meditation techniques as such. Of course, everyone has the right to their toys - whether it is a PlayStation or the opening of the chakras. On the other hand, it is worth learning that meditation does not necessarily come complete with Buddhism, yoga, veganism - and further down the list.
The creator of the Headspace meditation application and former Buddhist monk Andy Paddicombe never perceived meditation as a religious practice: "I did it rather to understand my own consciousness, to find a state in which the mind becomes more calm and pure." It is possible to arrive at useful and sound conclusions in different ways, including through religious and philosophical practices. But in the arsenal of humanity there is still a scientific method, as well as the ability to think logically. There is nothing mystical about closing your eyes and breathing deeply, but a couple of minutes of such simple exercises will allow you to calm down and distract from obsessive thoughts.
Why meditation recognize salvation from anxiety
Doctors are increasingly using meditation techniques to treat anxiety. Anxiety disorder, often astonishingly successful and active, is spoken everywhere today - from scientific conferences and medical publications to fashion blogs and television shows. Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Lizabeth Römer believes that meditation has a great therapeutic potential in this direction: "If people learn to perceive what is happening at the moment with acceptance and kindness and if they manage to use this skill in life in order to keep interest in things , it can help solve anxiety problem. "
Anxiety can be difficult to recognize. It can be easily identified by a spasm in the stomach or characteristic pressure in the chest, but anxiety often takes on less obvious forms, hiding behind procrastination, perfectionism, or heightened isolation. And if this is nothing but ways to escape from reality, then meditation is just aimed at accepting this reality and accepting it. There are fewer cases of depression, panic attacks, and anxiety among people who meditate.
What effect to expect from meditation
“Meditation instantly activates brain areas associated with such areas as the lateral prefrontal cortex. These areas are responsible for controlling feelings of anxiety, excitement and fear,” explains MD Rebecca Gladding, a clinical psychiatrist at the University of California, in her book “You Are Not Your Brain. " And according to research by the Institute of Medical Sciences in India, after 15 minutes of meditation, there is a decrease in heart rate and stabilization of the reactions of the nervous system.
Scientists from Johns Hopkins University claim: the more often you practice meditation, the more actively you “pump” the corresponding areas of the brain - as a result, your emotional state stabilizes. The fact is that in most cases stress arises from trifles about trifles and thoughts about something that did not happen, but it can happen - from the perspective of a missed deadline to the risk of being late for an important meeting. Such anxiety triggers a number of “fight at any cost” mechanisms in the brain, including stimulating the release of cortisol, which is called the stress hormone. It turns out that regular meditation can lead to a decrease in the level of cortisol secretion. It is also scientifically proven that exercises based on meditation help improve sleep and even develop empathy, that is, literally make us more sympathetic.
Regular practice of meditation can beneficially affect changes in the physical structure of the brain. The statement sounds incredible, but is based on quite convincing results of scientific research. About them in the framework of the project on the development of innovations TEDxCambridge was told, in particular, by the neurobiologist Sarah Lazar - and scored almost 700 thousand views on YouTube. The brain is capable of neuroplasticity, that is, the construction of new cells and compounds. When we meditate, the area of the brain that forces us to take things on a personal account relaxes, and the area that is responsible for empathy, activates its work. Even two months of regular meditation reduce the density of gray matter amygdala, the focus of fear and anxiety, and increase the density of the gray matter of the hippocampus, which is responsible for the formation of emotions and the transition of short-term memory into long-term.
How to start
Professionals claim that for beginners the most important thing is comfortable timing, and advise you to determine a convenient time for meditation. It is desirable that it was the same time, in the morning or in the evening. Most experts recommend starting with 5-10 minutes of meditation, and coach, yogi and entrepreneur Gabriel Bernstein advises to start to try just 1 minute. The simplest and most effective technique is to simply follow the breath. You should not try to force out all thoughts by force - it's better to just try not to develop them, allowing them to come and go.
For those who find it difficult to concentrate on their own or want to be interactive, a lot of applications will help. The market leader Headspace can be a complete meditation guide for beginners. True, in the free access there is only a ten-minute program, and for the variety of exercises will have to pay. Among free applications, Calm leads: it contains dozens of options for meditative exercises of different lengths, as well as meditation programs from 7 to 21 days and programs to improve sleep.
Muse is one of those apps that come bundled with an advanced gadget. For $ 300, you get a real brain simulator consisting of an application and sensors that are put on your head and read electrical impulses on the principle of electroencephalography. The application gives a task, for example, to keep calm at sea and prevent a storm, concentrating on your breathing and not being distracted by extraneous thoughts, and then assesses how well you have coped. Thanks to the Buddhist monks and the neurocomputer interface - the future is now.
PHOTO: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 via Shutterstock
