What is meditation?
There are different ways to meditate, and since it’s such a personal practice there are probably more than any of us know about. There are a couple that are usually focused heavily on scientific research, though. These are focused-attention, or mindful meditation, which is where you focus on one specific thing—it could be your breathing, a sensation in your body or a particular object outside of you. The point of this type of meditation is to focus strongly on one point and continually bring your attention back to that focal point when it wanders.
The other type of meditation that’s often used in research is open-monitoring meditation. This is where you pay attention to all of the things happening around you—you simply notice everything without reacting.
credit(Belle Beth Cooper)
Where meditation originated?
Meditation is an ancient practice that is believed to have originated in India several thousand years ago. Throughout early history, the practice was adopted by neighboring countries quickly and formed a part of many religions throughout the world.
The terminology used today to “meditate” was not introduced until the 12th century AD, coming from the Latin word meditatum.
Ancient history
The earliest documented records that mentioned meditation involved Vedantism, which is a Hindu tradition in India, around 1500 BCE. However, historians believe that meditation was practiced before this time, as early as 3000 BCE.
Between 600-500 BCE, the development of other meditation forms was recorded in Taoist China and Buddhist India, although the exact origins of these practices, particularly Buddhist meditation, continue to be debated among historians. The formula to the salvation of morality, contemplative concentration, knowledge, and liberation were believed to involve meditation as a central component.
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The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, outlining the eight limbs of yoga, was compiled between 400-100 BCE. During this same period, the Bhagavad Gita was written, which discusses the philosophy of yoga, meditation, and the practice of living a spiritual life.
The practice of meditation also spread to other cultures in the West via the Silk Road to influence religions such as Judaism. Later, in the 3rd century AD, Plotinus developed meditative techniques; however, they were not easily integrated into the Christian faith.
Early history
A Japanese monk, Dosho, discovered Zen on a visit to China in 653 and introduced the practice of meditation to Japan upon his return to the country, opening the first hall for meditation. The practice grew significantly in Japan from the 8th century AD onward, bringing the practice of meditation with it.
The term “meditate” originates from the Latin word meditatum, which means, “to ponder.” Monk Guigo II introduced this terminology for the first time in the 12th century AD.
History of Meditation Middle Ages and modern history
Throughout the Middle Ages, the practice of meditation grew and developed into many religious traditions as a form of prayer, such as Jewish meditation.
In the 18th century, the ancient teachings of meditation began to become more popular among the population of Western cultures.
In 1927, the book “Tibetan Book of the Dead” was published, which attracted significant attention from Westerners and excited interest about the practice. This was followed by the Vipassana movement, or insight meditation, which began in Burma in the 1950s. “The Dharma Bums” was published in 1958, attracting more attention to meditation at this time.
In 1979, the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program was founded in the United States, which used meditative techniques in the treatment plans for patients with chronic diseases.
Since this time, meditation has become increasingly more common, such that a survey in 2007 found that almost 1 in 10 Americans has meditated. It plays a central role in many religious traditions and rituals, in addition to helping individuals to manage stress and improve overall well-being.
Credit(Susan Chow)
What meditation does to the brain?
Meditation and mindfulness induce a heightened state of awareness and focused attention. Various studies demonstrate the practice can help relieve stress — as
well as manage anxiety, reduce inflammation, and improve memory and attention, to boot. Such striking results have many doctors, across specialties, prescribing meditation just as they would an anti-depressant or blood pressure medication. But it remains unclear just how meditation confers so many health benefits.
Credit(Kayt Sukel)
What happens in your brain when you meditate?
This is where things get really interesting. Using modern technology like MRI scans, scientists have developed a more thorough understanding of what’s taking place in our brains when we meditate, kind of similar to how scientists have previously looked at measuring creativity in our brains.
The overall difference is that our brains stop processing information as actively as they normally would. We start to show a decrease in beta waves, which indicate that our brains are processing information, even after a single 20-minute meditation session if we’ve never tried it before.
credit(Belle Beth Cooper)
How meditation affects your brain – beta waves?
Below is the best explanation I found of what happens in each part of the brain during meditation:
Frontal lobe
This is the most highly evolved part of the brain, responsible for reasoning, planning, emotions and self-conscious awareness. During meditation, the frontal cortex tends to go offline.
Parietal lobe
This part of the brain processes sensory information about the surrounding world, orienting you in time and space. During meditation, activity in the parietal lobe slows down.
Thalamus
The gatekeeper for the senses, this organ focuses your attention by funneling some sensory data deeper into the brain and stopping other signals in their tracks. Meditation reduces the flow of incoming information to a trickle.
Reticular formation
As the brain’s sentry, this structure receives incoming stimuli and puts the brain on alert, ready to respond. Meditating dials back the arousal signal.
credit(Belle Beth Cooper)
How meditation affects us?
Now that we know what’s going on inside our brains, let’s take a look at the research into the ways it affects our health. It’s in fact very similar to how exercising affects our brains.
Better focus
Because meditation is a practice in focusing our attention and being aware of when it drifts, this actually improves our focus when we’re not meditating, as well. It’s a lasting effect that comes from regular bouts of meditation.
Focused attention is very much like a muscle, one that needs to be strengthened through exercise.
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Less anxiety
This point is pretty technical, but it’s really interesting. The more we meditate, the less anxiety we have, and it turns out this is because we’re actually loosening the connections of particular neural pathways. This sounds bad, but it’s not.
What happens without meditation is that there’s a section of our brains that’s sometimes called the Me Center (it’s technically the medial prefrontal cortex). This is the part that processes information relating to ourselves and our experiences. Normally the neural pathways from the bodily sensation and fear centers of the brain to the Me Center are really strong. When you experience a scary or upsetting sensation, it triggers a strong reaction in your Me Center, making you feel scared and under attack.
When we meditate, we weaken this neural connection. This means that we don’t react as strongly to sensations that might have once lit up our Me Centers. As we weaken this connection, we simultaneously strengthen the connection between what’s known as our Assessment Center (the part of our brains known for reasoning) and our bodily sensation and fear centers. So when we experience scary or upsetting sensations, we can more easily look at them rationally. Here’s a good example:
For example, when you experience pain, rather than becoming anxious and assuming it means something is wrong with you, you can watch the pain rise and fall without becoming ensnared in a story about what it might mean.
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More creativity
As a writer, this is one thing I’m always interested in and we’ve explored the science of creativity in depth before. Unfortunately, it’s not the most easy thing to study, but there is some research into how meditation can affect our creativity.
Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands studied both focused-attention and open-monitoring mediation to see if there was any improvement in creativity afterwards. They found that people who practiced focused-attention meditation did not show any obvious signs of improvement in the creativity task following their meditation. For those who did open-monitoring meditation, however, they performed better on a task that asked them to come up with new ideas.
More compassion
Research on meditation has shown that empathy and compassion are higher in those who practice meditation regularly. One experiment showed participants images of other people that were either good, bad or neutral in what they called “compassion meditation.” The participants were able to focus their attention and reduce their emotional reactions to these images, even when they weren’t in a meditative state. They also experienced more compassion for others when shown disturbing images.
Part of this comes from activity in the amygdala — the part of the brain that processes emotional stimuli. During meditation, this part of the brain normally shows decreased activity, but in this experiment it was exceptionally responsive when participants were shown images of people.
Another study in 2008 found that people who meditated regularly had stronger activation levels in their temporal parietal junctures (a part of the brain tied to empathy) when they heard the sounds of people suffering, than those who didn’t meditate.
Better memory
One of the things meditation has been linked to is improving rapid memory recall.
Catherine Kerr, a researcher at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Osher Research Center found that people who practiced mindful meditation were able to adjust the brain wave that screens out distractions and increased their productivity more quickly than those that did not meditate. She said that this ability to ignore distractions could explain “their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts.” This seems to be very similar to the power of being exposed to new situations that will also dramatically improve our memory of things.
Less stress
Mindful meditation has been shown to help people perform under pressure while feeling less stressed. A 2012 study split a group of human resources managers into three, with one third participating in mindful meditation training, another third taking body relaxation training and the last third given no training at all.
A stressful multitasking test was given to all the managers before and after the eight-week experiment. In the final test, the group that had participated in the meditation training reported less stress during the test than both of the other groups.
More gray matter
Meditation has been linked to larger amounts of gray matter in the hippocampus and frontal areas of the brain. I didn’t know what this meant at first, but it turns out it’s pretty great. More gray matter can lead to more positive emotions, longer-lasting emotional stability and heightened focus during daily life.
Meditation has also been shown to diminish age-related effects on gray matter and reduce the decline of our cognitive functioning.credit(Belle Beth Cooper)
When meditation doesn’t work?
I often hear that meditation doesn’t work for someone. While I personally think that everyone could benefit from meditating, I also believe that if someone just isn’t into it, they won’t see the benefits and shouldn’t be forced.
However, when I ask these people what didn’t work for them, I often find that the reason it didn’t work is actually a pretty simple fix. So if you’re one of those people who thinks meditation doesn’t work for you, read on to see if any of these resonate with you — and learn how to fix it.
1. Your mind races.
I often hear “I can’t stop thinking.” You’re not meant to stop thinking. Meditation is not about stopping your thoughts. It’s about learning to observe them without judgment or attachment.
But most of us go through our days with our thoughts running on a loop and we don’t really pay a lot of attention to them. So when we sit down to meditate, and our focus is concentrated inside our minds, it can seem like our mind is suddenly racing. It can seem like we’re suddenly thinking about way more than we usually do.
This is normal. Learning to sit and be comfortable with your mind can take time. Learning how your mind operates — what you think about, whether you’re positive or negative, etc.- can be interesting but also a little intimidating.
Don’t let it stop you from meditating. Know that this is normal and simply keep coming back to the breath, your mantra, or whatever else you’re focusing on for the meditation.
2. Your mind wanders.
This seems like the same thing as your mind racing, but it’s a little different. With your mind wandering, you may not even notice until the timer signifying the end of your meditation goes off and you realize you just spent the last 10 minutes daydreaming.
Or you might end up thinking about that problem with the project at work or ruminating on what to get your spouse for their birthday.
It’s also normal for your mind to wander. Sometimes, that can even be the best kind of meditation though it may not seem like it. One purpose of meditation is to give your mind a break — and a daydream is like a mental vacation.
If you do notice that your mind has wandered before the end of your meditation, simply bring your focus back.
3. There’s no consistency.
The benefits of meditation are becoming more well known, and they’re quite varied. What isn’t always recognized is that these benefits are cumulative. A single meditation session will provide some benefits, but if you never repeat the experience, they’ll wear off and you’ll go back to feeling like you always have.
Keeping a consistent meditation practice is key to feeling the benefits.
An ideal practice would be daily at the same time in the same place. If your life and schedule don’t permit that, find other ways to be consistent. This might mean you meditate every day but at different times. It might mean you can only meditate every other day or once a week. You might associate your meditation with another activity that happens consistently and simply give yourself a 5–15 minute buffer before or after the activity to meditate.
4. You keep falling asleep.
Falling asleep is both a good and bad thing. It can be bad because you feel like you’re never finishing your meditation. But it can be good because it’s a sign that you are fully relaxing during your meditation — and that’s the goal.
Falling asleep — unless you are doing a meditation to help with sleep at bedtime — can be frustrating. The best way to stop it is to change up your meditation.
If you’re meditating immediately upon waking or right before bed, try meditating in the middle of the day instead. If you meditate in total silence, try playing some soft music or nature sounds. If you already use sounds but still fall asleep, try using an app like Insight Timer and setting a few bells at intervals throughout your practice — even if you start to drift off, the bells should bring you back to wakefulness.
5. You have body aches and pains.
Part of meditating is also learning to sit with things that make you uncomfortable — an itch, for example, or an annoying buzzing sound that you can’t identify where it’s coming from. But if you’ve got chronic or severe aches and pains, they can distract you from your practice or make it painful.
The first thing to do if body aches and pains are interfering with your meditation practice is see your doctor. Get diagnosed and treated, if necessary.
The next step is to see what you can do to make your practice more comfortable, despite the aches and pains. This may mean not sitting in a traditional meditation posture. You might instead lie on your bed, sit in a recliner, or place a pillow behind your lower back.
A final step would be to look for meditations designed to help ease aches and pains. The mind is a powerful thing and sometimes meditation can significantly decrease pain.
6. You get bored.
As a society, we’ve gotten very used to having plenty of things to grab our attention. People around us, books to read, TV shows to watch on dozens of streaming services, social media to scroll are all clamoring for our attention at all hours of the day and night. They distract us from our lives, our problems and our thoughts.
So when we sit down to meditate, sometimes it can seem downright boring. You’re sitting there, eyes closed, with only your thoughts to keep you company. You’re alone with yourself. And sometimes you’re bored.
The good news is the longer you stick with your practice, the less bored you’ll be. As you get to know more about how your mind works and the way you think, you’ll begin to be fascinated by what’s going on in there.
You can also alleviate boredom by asking yourself why you’re bored. Explore the boredom and see where that takes you.
7. You get great ideas or think of important things.
This is a great problem to have! No, really, it is. Meditation is about slowing down, getting to know what’s in your mind and how you think. So if you’re getting great ideas and remembering important things, that’s a pretty good indication that you are succeeding at slowing things down.
I know it can be frustrating to get these great ideas or remember something important during a meditation. You start to worry that you’ll forget by the time you’re done. So you stop meditating to go take care of it or at least write it down. But then it’s just too hard to get back into your meditation, so you figure you’ll just try again later.
If you’re struggling with meditation, you should really only be meditating for a few minutes — 5–20 minutes. So when a great idea or important thought comes up, tell yourself that you’ll remember when your meditation is over. Then let it go. I know it’s hard, but I promise it’s the right way to go.
First, it will help you get all the benefits out of your meditation. One of those benefits is an improved memory which means that not only will you be better able to remember those great ideas and important things when they come up in meditation, but they’ll come to you outside of meditation too.
8. You don’t find time.
So I’m going to be a little hard on you here. If you say “I can’t find time to meditate,” you need to stop lying to yourself and me. Just say what it really is: you don’t make time.
People find time for what’s important to them.
How much time do you spend scrolling social media? How many hours do you spend watching Netflix? How often do you stay late at work when you don’t really need to?
It’s time to be honest with yourself. Look at your calendar, look at how you spend your time, and really be brutal about it. I bet if you really look, you can find the time. And if you still say you can’t? Maybe it’s time to admit that meditation isn’t really your thing — and that’s okay.
9. Your expectations are too high.
Do you think you should not have any thoughts at all while meditating? Expect to breathe just right? Sit just so with your legs in the perfect position and your hands perfectly placed? Yeah, that’s why it’s not working for you.
If you expect it to be perfect, and particularly if your idea of perfection is over the top, you’ll be too focused on getting it perfect to get any benefit.
There are several sitting postures you can try for meditation. But if they don’t work for you, sit in a recliner. Lie on a bed or the floor. If you’re stressed and need to meditate in a pinch, you can sit in the bathroom stall, your car, or hiding under your desk in your cubicle. Your hands can lie palms up or palms down on your thighs. Your eyes can be closed, or you can be looking with a soft gaze at the floor, your desk, a candle, or whatever else is around. If breathing to a count of four or six is too much, then just take deep breaths and let them out as it feels good to you.
Basically, the rules of meditation aren’t meant to be sticks with which you beat yourself if you don’t or can’t follow them. Think of them more as guidelines and adapt them as needed.
10. You expect immediate results.
Did you think you’d sit down, meditate for one minute (or five) and boom, everything would be different? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it doesn’t work like that.
Can you feel the benefits in a single session? Absolutely! But referring back to reason , they won’t last. And in some cases, like improving sleep or lowering blood pressure, a single session won’t make a significant difference — you may not even really notice it. This can lead you to think “this isn’t working,” when in fact, you just need to give it more time.
Just like working out or changing the way you eat, meditation takes time to notice a major change. I usually recommend giving it at least a full month (if you meditate daily for at least 5–10 minutes) before you decide it’s not working. And if you skip a day here and there during that month, it’s okay as long as you meditated more days than you didn’t.
And if you still don’t see a difference after a month? You might consider hiring a meditation teacher or finding some local groups or classes before you give up on meditation completely.
Meditation can be a powerful tool
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If you’re able to harness the power, meditation can change your life. The impact on the brain, body, and emotions is real. You just have to be realistic and consistent with realistic expectations.
Don’t give up on your practice. If meditation is important to you, keep tweaking your practice until it does work for you. It’ll happen if you stick with it.
Credit for this question(Wendy Miller)
Why is meditation important?
Cost—
The Court’s In-House mediation programs are covered by your filing fees.
While an outside mediator may charge a fee comparable to that of an attorney, the mediation process generally takes much less time than moving a case through standard legal channels. While a case in the hands of a lawyer or a court may take months or years to resolve, mediation usually achieves a resolution in a matter of hours. Taking less time means expending less money on hourly fees and costs.
Confidentiality—
While court hearings are public, mediation remains strictly confidential. No one but the parties to the dispute and the mediator(s) know what happened.
Confidentiality in mediation has such importance that in most cases the legal system cannot force a mediator to testify in court as to the content or progress of mediation. Many mediators destroy their notes taken during a mediation once that mediation has finished. The only exceptions to such strict confidentiality usually involve child abuse or actual or threatened criminal acts.
Control—
Mediation increases the control the parties have over the resolution.
In a court case, the parties obtain a resolution, but control resides with the judge or jury. Often, a judge or jury cannot legally provide solutions that emerge in mediation. Thus, mediation is more likely to produce a result that is mutually agreeable for the parties.
Compliance—
Because the result is attained by the parties working together and is mutually agreeable, compliance with the mediated agreement is usually high. This further reduces costs, because the parties do not have to employ an attorney to force compliance with the agreement. The mediated agreement is, however, fully enforceable in a court of law.
Mutuality—
Parties to a mediation are typically ready to work mutually toward a resolution.
In most circumstances the mere fact that parties are willing to mediate means that they are ready to “move” their position. The parties thus are more amenable to understanding the other party’s side and work on underlying issues to the dispute. This has the added benefit of often preserving the relationship the parties had before the dispute.
Support—
Mediators are trained in working with difficult situations. The mediator acts as a neutral facilitator and guides the parties through the process. The mediator helps the parties think “outside of the box” for possible solutions to the dispute, broadening the range of possible solutions.
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