Since teaching and publishing more in the topic of meditation, I get asked by people to explain the benefits a lot. I often start by saying all the banal things like increased alertness, better attentional control, increased concentration, less distraction, increased activation of prefrontal cortices, thicker connections between the hemispheres etc.
But what else can we gain? What does sitting quietly do for us?
The closest analogy is that of a mobile phone.
The brain requires ALOT of energy in the form adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to power it, for cellular function, synapses and thinking.
Like a phone battery that requires power; it needs to be recharged.
What happens when you need to charge a phone? Usually, you leave it overnight on a stand, plug it in and switch off notifications but the phone is still ‘ON’. And this is what meditation does – it allows you to recharge in the sense that, sitting still lets you observe your own mind. You can observe the quality of the mind. Are you thinking or worrying about sex, work, money, kids, pets, food? How much of the worry is needless and how much is essential?
The cyclical process of observing and returning to meditation instructions or focusing on your breath facilitates this as you start to disentangle what is truly important. In the process of it, it gives you glimpses of insight, eg. solutions for you to move ahead, meaning to your pain, sorrow or joy. Which in turn refreshes your perspective. This means that your mind and brain is being recharged even without you realising it.
Your mental state/ mind requires a reset every now and again to move to a new level of understand.
Like a phone operating system that has been corrupted from its original state; the mind needs an updated version too.
So I talked about cycles in life in a previous post, and when we hit a down period, its important to take stock of where we are and stop bashing our heads against the wall. Unless if we are ascetics or monks in a monastery, we still need to live, to work and move along life’s processes. This is not easy, because we need to be objective with ourselves and more often than not our emotions get in the way.
What are emotions by the way? They are essentially Energy-in-Motion – leading to thoughts. But what kind of energy? Well, most of the time negative, cynical, self-censoring kind – meaning corrupted mental states. In a sense, instead of dwelling in those negative thoughts, the recharging period gives us an opportunity to observe them objectively. You start to realise that they usually have no use in your life and that the more you dwell on them, the more power you give them.
Eventually, a commonly experienced process in meditation is that, we break out of this cycle and stop dwelling on them. Literally stop. Its like when you don’t want to communicate with a certain person anymore – you just block them. But in meditation, you are aware of them (emotions and thoughts), you just don’t give them power. And yes, you start to control YOUR OWN MIND (you still can’t control other minds like Prof. Xavier). Powerful stuff.
You then are able to reset your mind back to a happier and healthier state. One that is more productive, more joyful to the people around you. Your emotional bearing fluctuates less. But, this does not mean that you don’t feel the emotions, in fact you feel the emotions much more readily, realistically and fully. Happiness or sadness are embraced but without the power that they used to have to make you go into more severe states.
Your brain indeed has a finite amount of physical resources (different from the mind).
Like the limited memory space on your phone.
So we built up a lot of crap in our minds over the years – beliefs, illusions, disillusions, rituals etc. Some of them useful and some of them non-essential. Some of them were shed without you realising but some just stick around like a pesky fly that would not let you go!
Like clearing phone memory, meditation allows for you to reflect upon and revisit old memories and ‘ghosts hiding in your closet’. Those awful breakups, those people who betrayed you (or you to them), those lost emotions from deaths, nasty bosses – you able to put meaning to them, gain insight and release them to their needed resting places.
When you do manage to clear up some space in your mind and body, then you essentially gain capacity to invite new and good practises back into your life. The ones that allow you to thrive, to excel and to live to the best of your potential in this life!!
