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Meditation

Three Things Every Mindfulness Meditator Should Know

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If You’re Going to Meditate, You’re Going to Need to Know a Few Things First

Unless you’ve spent the past few years helping Elon Musk and the SpaceX team build the road to making humanity multiplanetary, you’ve probably heard a lot about mindfulness recently. Popular magazines, books, and self-help articles encourage us to add mindfulness into our daily routine. In fact, in 2020 it was voted the most frequent buzzword used by top health and wellness experts who predicted that within the next decade, purpose driven mindfulness will become a worldwide health movement. As a result, mindfulness meditation is quickly growing in popularity. We’ve got social media and celebrity endorsements to thank for that, too. But do you really know what it takes to become a mindfulness meditator? Here are the three things every mindfulness meditator should know.

#1: What Being Mindful Is

Let’s start with the basics. If you want to learn mindfulness meditation, you’ll need to be familiar with the term mindful. It’s a concept meditators use to boost their meditation practice and improve their everyday lives. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines mindfulness this way:

Mindfulness (noun)

The practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis.

The Importance of Mindfulness in Meditation

When you meditate, you are training yourself to live in the present moment. Mindfulness means your attention is focused on your thoughts and feelings in each moment. Because it keeps you anchored in the present, mindfulness can have a powerful healing effect. By staying present and experiencing the moment, you’ll naturally start to let go of anxiety, stress and overwhelm. You’ll become a mindful meditator. As a result, you’ll become more calm, peaceful, and relaxed both on and off the meditation cushion.

#2: How to Get to Know Yourself on a Deeper Level

Mindfulness is also about being self-aware. It’s understanding that as unique individuals, we’re all made up of thoughts, patterns, and complex ways of being. Mindfulness meditation gives us the chance to know ourselves on a much deeper level. For instance, as we mindfully observe our thoughts and belief systems without criticism or judgement, we become aware of just how much they may be holding us back. By becoming aware, we can finally let go of what no longer serves us and move forward with a healthier mindset.

#3: How to Use Mindfulness as a Tool for Self-Knowledge and Growth

Mindfulness can be a powerful tool for self-knowledge, healing, and positive change. It can also help us build a strong and healthy meditation practice by keeping us anchored in the present moment. When we’re mindful, we learn the power of letting go of the past. We also start to discover what it is that we need to in order to best move forward through our challenges. Mindfulness meditation is all about cultivating peace, calm, and joy from the inside out. Without bringing mindfulness to our practice, we’re more likely to feel like we’re just closing our eyes and sitting in the dark.

Mindfulness meditation isn’t about having the the perfect experience every time. But understanding the definition of mindfulness is the first step to creating a healthy and sustainable mindfulness meditation practice. Knowing yourself on a deeper level, and being able to put that knowledge to good use are the natural results of mindfulness that will begin to grow, deepen, and pay dividends the more attention you give to being mindful.

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3 Reasons Why Your Brain Loves Meditation (A Lot)

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Meditation and Current Brain Research

When it comes to falling in love, there’s a huge debate. Is it your head, or is it your heart that makes you experience butterflies in your stomach and your pulse race when the object of your affection walks by? Neuroscientists are still trying to figure that out. However, there is one thing that health experts, scientists, and brain researchers do agree on. That is, mediation is not only good for the body, but it’s even better for the brain. Here’s just a few of the reasons why your brain loves meditation.

Building Healthy Gray Matter

Today, scientists have hard prove that meditation has positive, measurable effects on the brain. For instance, a recent UCLA study found that meditators develop more brain gray matter over time than non-meditators. Gray matter controls important functions in the brain like muscle control, memory, and speech. We need lots of it to stay healthy, especially as we grow older. Meditation, therefore keeps us healthy by supporting the growth of gray matter in the brain.

Getting Rid of “Monkey Mind”

Another reason why the brain loves meditation comes from a 2011 Yale University study. Researchers found that meditation slows down our brain’s tendencies towards wandering thoughts, which in turn creates more feelings of inner calm and peacefulness. In eastern philosophy, this kind of thought-restlessness is referred to as “monkey-mind.” Hint: If you suffer from wandering thoughts, worry a lot about the future, or ruminate about the past, you’ve got monkey-mind. By interrupting these kind of negative thought patterns in the brain, meditation naturally increases feelings of well-being and happiness.

Thinking Happier

At John Hopkins University, scientists discovered that meditators were able to successfully reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety in less than eight weeks, compared to the results of non-meditators. Similarly, Harvard researchers found that mindful meditation decreases cellular activity in the amygdala portion of the brain. Located deep in the temporal lobes, the amygdala controls our autonomic responses, like anxiety and fear. This shows that meditation can be an important tool for both strengthening our emotional resilience and improving our mental health.

Feeling Healthier

It turns out that having a healthy brain is the key to unlocking our ability to feel good about ourselves, age in healthy ways, and get rid of stress and anxiety. Can meditation really help us find peace and calm in our lives? You’ll never know until you try. But researchers agree that with the help of a good teacher, regular practice, and a little bit of time, we can learn new ways to think and feel better. Expanding areas of the brain linked to empathy, kindness, and compassion is what the world needs now. That, and love, sweet, love, is the real reason why your brain loves meditation.