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Why Should I Meditate?

When I was in graduate school training to become a psychotherapist, the class would usually start the day with meditation.  I hated it.  I just couldn't sit there and imagine putting my troubles on lily pads and floating them away on a river.  Instead I arrived to class late.

Since then I have learned a lot about how our brains work, how emotions are generated and how emotions associated with difficult memories impact our daily lives. I have also come to understand and experience how our own reactivity, which creates the urge to do self-defeating things, is related.  Meditation strengthens the part of our brain that can calm us in difficult emotional moments.

I could bore you with technical details, but I won't.  Instead I'll make it really simple.  When you have a thought in your brain, a chemical signal is sent to your body to generate an emotion corresponding to that thought.  As your body feels, your thoughts work to match the feeling.  Now you're in a loop.  The more your thinking matches your feelings, the more your feelings will match your thinking.  What gets you out of this loop is the logical, reasonable and objective part of your brain which is more connected to your consciousness - your higher self that is YOU.  Your ability to move your awareness out of your body and into your intentional conscious self is powerful.  Now you're responding versus reacting like a threatened animal.

Strengthening this ability is but one of the many important reasons why meditation is powerful.  When you increase this strength, you can stay calm in the face of cues that trigger a response in your body. You have a better chance at quality sleep.  Issues such as anxiety, PTSD, trauma, and depression will take less of a hold on you.  You are better able to hold a vision of what you want your life to look like and attract that outcome; that's how it works.

There are lots of resources to learn to meditate - which I prefer to call "mental rehearsal", the best of which is through a book called Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza.  This is a fantastic book that I highly recommend.  On his website you can buy a couple guided meditations that I also strongly suggest.  It takes a few weeks to re-wire your brain. Take the thirty day challenge and meditate for ten to fifteen minutes every day for thirty days.  Then write me and let me know about your experience.