#004 Why meditation is essential for wellbeing
For me meditation is like skiing, you either love it or can’t work out what people are on about when they rave about how good it is.
For a long time I was meditation curious, but couldn’t work out what all the fuss was about. You sat down, felt a bit uncomfortable sitting cross-legged, your mind wandered, you berated yourself for mind wandering, and continued until the timer went off. I would meditate for a few days, lose interest, come back to it and yo-yo around.
But this year, I started on 1 January with Jacqui Lewis’s book The 14 Day https://thebroadplace.com.au/product/14-day-mind-cleanse/Mind Cleanse as a way of kickstarting the habit again. While I am quite a disciplined person, I find that unless I carve out the same time every day it wouldn’t get done. I would forget, or kids would interrupt me, or (insert any other reason here).
The book is premised on the fact that we tend to look after our bodies – juice cleanse, regular exercise, good nutrition, but we don’t often treat our minds in the same way – and highlights the practices we can do to keep our minds in tip top shape.
Some of the exercises prescribed are:
· Daily meditation practice
· Powering down before bed to lay the foundation for better sleep
· Doing away with multi-tasking
· Banishing ‘busy’ by prioritising and reframing.
I got through the 14 day cleanse on the new beginnings high that January brings, and I have managed to (mostly) keep up with a daily meditation practice (I loved this book and Jacqui’s teaching so much that I have signed up to do meditation teacher training with her later this year!).
Why did I persevere? Because I have read the science about meditation’s life changing impact on your brain and wellbeing. Meditation is not some hippy subject with a few niche studies. It is the subject of major academic and scientific enquiry, from cognitive function in children to greater regulation of gut microbiota homeostasis. Searching meditation on google scholar for academic research papers spits out 1,360,000 results – meditation research is serious business. Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn, a world-renowned expert and teacher of meditation says that you come to meditation out of suffering or love, no one necessarily wakes up and thinks that they just want to do it.
One of the largest and most thorough studies on meditation was the Shamantha Project. The study consisted of two, three-month meditation retreats, each with 30 contemplatives (participants). The second retreat acted as a wait-list control group, with the contemplatives matched on age, sex, and years of meditation experience. The test group of contemplatives meditated for 6 hours a day and complemented this with practice of the four immeasurables — loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and impartiality — which are designed to increase one’s positive aspirations toward greater well-being.
The findings of this project included:
Intensive Contemplative Training: Sharpens and sustains attention, enhances well-being and leads to less judgmental, more empathic emotional responding to the suffering of others. Additionally, the training was linked with pro-social emotional behaviour and important physiological markers of health.
Attention: How was attention improved? Participants in both retreats improved in perceptual sensitivity; the capacity to inhibit responses also improved with training.
Emotions and Well-Being: There were robust improvements in psychological well-being over the course of the retreat – improvements that endured at least five months after training.
Biomarkers: A number of health-relevant biomarkers that may change as a result of meditation training were also assessed. One of these, telomerase, an enzyme that protects genetic material during cell division and enhances cellular viability, is often suppressed in response to psychological distress. Blood samples obtained at the end of the retreat revealed that telomerase activity was significantly greater in retreat participants (vs. controls) and that telomerase activity was related to meditation-induced changes in well-being.
While it is unrealistic that any of us are likely to embrace a life of asceticism anytime soon and take up meditating for 6 hours a day, many studies show that significant benefits to wellbeing can be achieved with a 10 minute practice per day.
There are many different meditation techniques out there, and if you have tried meditation and decided it wasn’t for you, it is possible (probable in fact!) that you just haven’t landed on the technique (or teacher) that resonates for you.
The three key methods of meditation practice are:
· Contemplation (guided practice)
· Concentration (focussed attention)
· Mantra (repetition of a word or phrase)
While I think all methods are great, some are easier than others. For me, I enjoy mantra meditation, particularly the practice of ‘Metta’ or loving kindness meditation, which is a centuries old practice from the Buddhist tradition that involves a set of phrases sending out your wish that you, and all beings, be happy, peaceful, and healthy. The Insight Timer App has a tonne of great (often free) meditation practices that you can listen to if you want a guide for your practice. If you think Metta might be your thing, I love the practices that Sharon Salzberg shares.
If you signed up for Mindful in May, this is also a great way to kickstart or reinvigorate your practice. Sticking with a 10-15 minute practice, daily, for the entire month, is much more likely to see you stick to your practice – both because of the community around practicing with people around the world for 31 days, but also the habit pathway that is formed, especially if you practice at around the same time every day.
I loved this quote from Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn (one of the founders of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) technique), during Mindful in May’s interview posted on day 3:
It is not the object of attention that is important, it is the attending.
So this month, build the habit of attending – to your breath, to the sensations of sitting, to contemplation. And remember there is no ‘right way’ to meditate. It is all an exploration – and what resonates for me will not ‘feel’ the same for you. That is part of the beauty of the practice.
I would love to know if you are starting or re-starting a meditation practice this month. Let me know how you go and happy meditating!
Be well
Alicia
For more information
Hyperlinks are scattered throughout this post and I also love the following books:
Jacqui Lewis – The 14 day Mind Cleanse
Dr B. Alan Wallace – The Four Immeasurables: Practices to Open Your Heart
Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn – Falling Awake: How to practice mindfulness in everyday life