In this article we will be discussing the five most common benefits of meditation.
Now meditation, unlike most activities is not a set routine, which means it does not have a set outcome and therefore no set result to strive for.
When you exercise, for example – whether that be cardio or lifting weights – you are doing a similar activity every time and in doing so you will get the same result every single time you do that activity – in this example; sweating, weight loss, and/or muscle gain.
Also, you usually have a goal or result, which you strive for.
However, when you meditate each time is different. Each time is a discovery of your uniqueness rather than an effort to improve on that – you.
Sure, on the outside you will be doing the same thing, – simply sitting very still. But on the inside you will often be feeling different pains or disturbances as the build-up of daily or life-long tensions leave your body – which is often followed by insights and relief.
And then of course the very fulfilling feelings of going into a deeper quieter sense of yourself follows each time.
Because each time you meditate will be affected by what you are feeling that day, whatever you are going through that day and where you are coming from in wanting to meditate in the first place will uniquely determine your meditation experience.
So this article is not about things that you need to strive for or look for in your meditation.
This article is to help explain for you, the experiences and changes that can come out of meditation. These experiences and changes in you can occur over a long period of time, or they can happen straight away.
But these benefits are not set in stone. They vary from person to person.
And unlike exercise there is no goal to be reached. You are just sitting down and experiencing yourself exactly how you are, in order to more deeply understand and appreciate being you.
And unique to all other activities – in which you are trying to improve yourself somehow – the benefits that come from the activity of meditating is you experience yourself more deeply than ever – from which you discover – you are perfectly fine with yourself as you are.
And believe me, that’s a huge and very real relief.
Now enough of the explanation, let’s get into it…
Number One:
The most common and simple benefit is the quiet time.
I know that sounds very basic and straight forward and you might be thinking –
‘Well I can get quiet time whenever I want, why do I need to meditate to get that?’
Well that’s it.
We don’t get real quiet time. We get semi-quiet time like sitting reading a book, or going on our phone or sleeping. We don’t get real quiet time where we can just experience how we are feeling, to experience and discover what is really going on in our body – Not without getting distracted by the activity of unrelated thinking or things going on around us.
We – the body – need quiet time every day, to experience, digest and relieve ourselves of the effects that life has on us.
Because – when we meditate we are able to release the disturbing or annoying effects of excessive or unwanted thinking and return to a deeper quieter sense of feeling in our body. Doing this is how we respond to ourselves fully.
This way we are able to cope more easily with what people and life throw at us relatively easily.
The more you do this – the more real quiet time you give yourself – the more you will see and experience the beneficial changes in both your mental and physical health.
By giving yourself the time and attention to heal, resolve and dissolve any stress, disturbances or just life experiences that have affected you, both mentally and physically, any needed recovery or changes get a chance to happen naturally. It’s what your body will do if you just give it some real quiet time.
This meditation, this quiet time is the highest quality of ‘me’ time.
You are giving yourself 10 minutes or 30 minutes or 2 hours a day, to just come back to yourself and give yourself the attention you need. Away from the distractions of thinking or socialising or technology.
Just by doing this at least once a day you will start to see changes within your life without even trying to change things. Because you are finally giving yourself the attention and ‘self-love’ that you – the body – needs, a natural and automatic correction kicks in. This is because your body knows exactly what is needed and what to do. Real quiet time gives this a chance to happen within you. Try it for yourself. You might be surprised.
Number Two:
Understanding and resolving the stresses and behaviours that make up you.
Now I know that may sound weird, but hear me out.
In our day-to-day life we have stresses, pains and disturbances that occur within us throughout the day. And because of these we react in certain ways and have certain behaviours that often we don’t even understand.
These will vary depending on the day, situation and/or mood we are in. But they appear within us regularly in our everyday life, and they are so normal that usually we don’t even notice them.
Sometimes, we will do something or react a certain way and in that moment we will question ourselves, – ‘oh why did I react like that’ OR ‘why do I feel this way now’ – these are some of the things that we will start to discover and recover from, as other benefits of meditation.
When you’re sitting physically still – while meditating – you are able to get in touch with and be more aware of certain behaviours, feelings, reactions etc. that you wouldn’t normally notice just living your life.
Some of these feelings you may even recognise from your day-to-day life.
Let’s say a certain ‘stress’ you are used to and regularly notice from work.
The longer and more often you sit still, giving yourself real quiet time, the more you will be able to see or sense this feeling – of stress – popping up in many areas of your life. You will soon see the exact same feeling just duplicating itself in different parts of your life.
This is because, when we create a certain behaviour in a certain part of our life, until we resolve that behaviour, it will continue to pop up again and again in other areas of our life for the rest of our lives.
For example, if you create a stressful feeling and behaviour around say, school-work when you’re a child, and you never resolve that feeling, later down the track in adult working-life, your learned association with that feeling, will repeat as an exaggerated reaction to the feeling of stress and generate a similar behaviour as an adult. This is usually because you have unconsciously associated the current environment of ‘work’ with the past environment of ‘school’ because of the underlying feeling of stress being the same. That unresolved and familiar feeling of stress from school is the common denominator linking these two environments. So your reaction at work now is irrationally a stressful one. Then it is common for all work-related things to become stressful for you, even if, as an adult they really aren’t.
In order to resolve this you need to stay with the feeling – the stress – however that feels in your body, and feel it to its end.
Often the longer you sit with this feeling the stronger it will become, until it gets to a breaking point and from there that feeling will start to fade. In turn, and once this old feeling dissipates from within your body, how you feel about your work or any work-related environments will change and will no longer be a cause of irrational or overwhelming distress for you.
Because you have finally given that feeling or sensation the attention it needs, it is able to resolve and dissipate naturally, rather than remain suppressed and then erupting in reaction to your work from time to time.
So overwhelming distress in adult situations are generally due to behaviours learned in childhood which we haven’t grown out of yet. Being a child under adult pressure is very difficult but being an adult under adult pressures is pretty easy.
It is important to understand that we cannot force change on these behaviours or feelings that we don’t like, but the longer and more we sit with them, feeling their presence within us the more they will dissipate. Or in daily life, whenever they show up as reactions to our life, the more you just feel these within your body rather than act on these, the more they will dissolve. In this way, you will allow your feelings and the behaviours they drive to change organically, on their own and in their own time, and they will change this way.
Number Three:
Self-acceptance comes from understanding you.
Now obviously we live with ourselves.
Every. Single. Day.
We know all our ins and outs. We know that we hate tomatoes and love cheese, that we prefer bread over pasta and so on and so forth.
But there are certain things about ourselves that we don’t understand.
So when we are able to sit quietly with ourselves, and really feel everything that is going on for us, whether it be good, or bad, or ugly, or beautiful, if we can sit with this and just experience it as it is, we will come to discover and accept everything about us, which on its own is another one of the benefits of meditation.
Real meditation is about understanding. It is about understanding yourself and what is going on for you. It’s not about understanding the universe or finding out about an imagined bigger picture, or striving for mythical goals like becoming enlightened. It is purely and simply about finding out about you, from being you and so the result is – understanding YOU.
Little old you.
Now when I say ‘understanding’, what I mean is more of a deeper felt-sense of understanding rather than an intellectual one.
While sitting with, or experiencing these emotions, sensations, feelings etc. that go on in your body, you will come to a deeper understanding of yourself this way. Whether you understand it intellectually or you just feel clarity and understanding from within it, doesn’t matter. Both can and will happen. But the intellectual understanding will come after your sensed or felt understanding. Your intellectual understanding – what you think – is only the description of – what you already know in your experienced discovery of what it is to be you.
So as you sit physically still and feel all the sensations, feelings, itches, aches and pains throughout your body, you become aware of so much more from within these pains.
Over the years I have been meditating there are things that I have discovered about myself that I never would have if I didn’t meditate.
For example…
Say one day I’m feeling particularly shitty. My mood is low, everything around me sucks because of it and so my work sucks, my food sucks, basically everything sucks.
You get my point.
So instead of sitting around getting annoyed by my mood or trying to figure it out. I’ll sit down and meditate. Which means I will sit down and go deeper than my thinking, beneath all that background noise and into just the feeling of me in my body. That’s it! I won’t try to change it. I will just feel however it feels inside me, the body. It may take 10 minutes, it may even take an hour, but soon that shitty feeling will start to fade.
As far as benefits of meditation go this is huge.
Now sometimes I won’t know why I felt shitty or what was causing my bad mood and that’s perfectly fine, there is no need to always intellectually KNOW every little detail. That’s the brilliant part, that’s the brilliance of the body – you are just able to experience the feeling in there and in that moment, you understand it physically as a deeper felt understanding rather than a superficial or intellectual one.
Because that’s most of it. The intellectual part is just the last part of putting understanding into words. The first part, or the first 9/10ths of it, exists inside the body as all the sensations in there. And without that felt-understanding you will never understand you.
Sure thinking is a big part of our life. It is this little voice yabbering away in our head 24/7. But our physical sensations and feelings are a whole other level of understanding.
And THAT is the understanding I’m talking about here.
So in sitting with that shitty feeling, I’m able to resolve whatever it was, and feel ‘better’ in myself.
The bonus of understanding on this level – our deeper body sense – is that sitting with and processing a distressful feeling in this way, is the distress or shitty part attached to any feeling eventually drops away. So what was the ‘shitty’ feeling changes and is then felt, understood and becomes acceptable.
The second bonus is, any fear or dislike of the possibility of that or other disturbing feelings coming up again in the future is also lessened because you have a new understanding of how to resolve your disturbances. This proves to you how you are able to resolve any future distress for yourself.
This is one of the hugely practical benefits of meditation that changes your fear of any feelings that you have struggled with in life.
So we don’t need to always understand ourselves on an intellectual level. If we are just able to sit for 10, 20, 60 minutes a day with ourselves and experience how we are feeling that day, without judgment or criticism, we will fully get it, we will get what it is to be ourselves and also, be okay with that. How cool is that!
Now this is understanding ourselves. This is accepting yourself.
Then as life goes on, things you do start to become more clear for you, and your annoying behaviours, disturbing feelings or upsetting reactions to certain things will fade and you, without even realising it will start to change into really being you.
Number Four:
How you treat yourself determines how you treat others.
Because how we treat others will always reflect in some way how we treat and/or think about ourselves.
The treatment of yourself is so important, and if you’re treating yourself badly or thinking about yourself in a bad way it can affect you both mentally and physically.
I know there are a lot of people out there who feel great hatred for themselves and no matter what the facts are, or what people tell them, they cannot see any other view of themselves.
And I can vouch for this. I use to hate myself deeply and no matter what people told me I couldn’t seem to like myself. Sometimes this hatred would build up so much inside me that I’d end up lashing out at people, my parents, friends, anybody.
Even though I didn’t want to and knew it was wrong, I couldn’t help myself.
But once I started meditating I found my self-hatred became less and my outbursts at others were less frequent.
I started to sit longer with the anger and the self-hatred and the longer I sat with it, the more it would fade and I was soon left with just sadness.
This overwhelming sadness.
And the more my anger faded the more it revealed that underneath it I was actually very sad.
So I would just stay with that.
Without judgment or reaction, just sitting physically still and feeling the sadness throughout my whole body.
Sometimes when I was in distress or vulnerable the anger and frustration at myself and the world would come back and all the thoughts and feelings would come screaming back and I’d hate myself or my parents or the world.
But as these feelings were lessening, I wasn’t feeling like this all the time any more, and it would only come in bursts.
And I found that if I didn’t go along with the thoughts, didn’t play their little game and agree with them, they wouldn’t be so loud or have so much effect on me. I did this by coming back to my feelings that were behind or beneath those thoughts, and just feeling them.
This I found worked the best.
Because if you ignore a bully, if you don’t play their little game and agree with what they’re saying, they’ll get bored and move on, or in the case of your thoughts, they’ll eventually fade away.
It’s the same with these thoughts about yourself, which are often like bullies, the more you just keep living, keep meditating, keep going about your life and just let those thoughts go on in the background, unattended, the quieter they will become until eventually they fade away completely.
So…
Do not go along with the thoughts.
Do not agree with the thoughts.
Do not indulge in the feelings.
But, do not suppress them either. If you are just feeling them, without indulging in them by thinking about them, or acting them out, then you are not suppressing them, you are resolving them.
Then you will no longer give them any power or relevance in your life. The thoughts or feelings you stop thinking about and indulging in, just stop. How you do this is you go deeper into the feelings that drive them, in however you feel in your body.
And the longer and more often you sit with the feelings, of anger, frustration, hatred or sadness, the quicker you will heal, resolve and dissolve these feelings altogether.
As the feelings are healed and resolved, so the thoughts which they drive or express will also go.
But the most important thing to remember, while going through this, while feeling and experiencing these feelings in meditation or in every-day life –
– is that these feelings are not wrong.
Just because you don’t like feeling this way doesn’t mean there is something wrong with feeling this way. You just don’t like it. But this is just how you feel in this moment. Whether you are feeling happy, or sad, or excited. They are all just another feeling which will change in time and without all the fuss and distress, if you just feel it.
So in the process of healing them. Do not judge them, do not hate them. Because in doing so you are playing their game, you are agreeing with them, and you are not helping yourself in anyway.
None of these feelings are wrong anyway. You should be this way. You are this way because of whatever has happened to you. You are only the way you are because something has made you that way and the way you are is a natural reaction to that.
The horrible feelings of being you are there so that you can know what you need. They make you feel them, they make you feel that way to heal you, not to hurt you. They are not wrong. They are what is going to heal you, and in the end, feeling them will be what causes all the changes you want. Nothing else will.
Finally, in doing all of this. Your treatment of others will change naturally as your treatment of yourself improves. And it will improve as your understanding of the above, and of yourself deepens. Try holding the sense of this new understanding for a while, let it resonate for you, see how it feels in your body, this is your meditation, to feel the sense of this for a while. This is your own personal meditation, to feel the sense of however you are feeling. Make sure you come back to this again and again until you see your way clear of the harmful mistake of self-judgement. And eventually you won’t judge yourself anymore. And then wherever your system needs to change itself, it can and it will.
Number Five:
Healing – one of the most underestimated benefits of meditation.
Now this is for me the most basic and obvious benefit of meditation. Because this is the benefit that ties all benefits together.
Because you are meditating, you are willingly going through or feeling the presence and effects of these behaviours, these feelings, these pains and thoughts. That is why and how you are healing them, that is why and how you are healing yourself.
No matter if it is a small thing or a large thing, known or unknown to you, while meditating you are healing.
Simply because you are sitting physically still with yourself, without judgment or criticism or any ideas of how you should be, (although these will come up at times) by just being as you are for now, your body gets a chance to heal everything that needs healing. You don’t need to try to achieve anything yourself. That’s not how nature cures itself. As you are the body and the body is nature, you should let it do what it needs to and it will. And now you know how to, you can.
And in doing this you are unconsciously and unintentionally healing yourself from what life has put on you, what others have put on you, but most importantly from what you yourself have learned to put on you.
It is that simple. It is that straightforward. Feel it and you will heal. Ignore or deny it and you won’t heal.
All you need to do is be with yourself, really be with yourself, for all the real quiet time you need. And then you will receive all the healing benefits you need from just doing that. During your quiet time you simply need to stop thinking about yourself or others by going deeper into feeling all the most–obvious and, just as importantly, the most–subtle sensations in your body. This is the greatest benefit of meditation, this real and natural meditation of the body we are. It’s all the body wants and needs to take care of itself as only nature – the body can. And if you let it, in this way, it will.
