Millions of people have joined the Yoga revolution since last few years. Hundreds of scientific results have been published all acknowledging the tremendous impact yoga and meditation can have on our life. It has become the new "healthy practice" popular enough to make you feel guilty if you aren't doing it.
Though, good health is just one of the benefits of Yoga, it was developed as a means to achieve something much more - To free ourselves from our compulsive nature of our mind and finally be peace with existence - just as it is and in the process, health improvement is just a fancy byproduct.
The philosophy of meditation is simple. If you realize who you truly are, you will be happy and satisfied because there is nothing more important in life than that. Meaningless desires disappear, ego disappears because you now see yourself as something much more than them. You become more in tune with existence, to the extent that your personality which comprises of ego, perceptions, prejudices, negative mindset just disappears. You become this independent mind free from any conditioning and ever-fresh!
Okay wait, how is that possible? For that lets observe this quote -
The more I am involved in doing something, the more I realize I am not the doer.
Remember the times you were so engrossed in working on a project, that you forgot where are you sitting, whether you ate or not or how much time has passed. You enter in a all-together different zone of single-pointed focus and your mind gets fully engrossed. You may have observed in this state, ideas just flow naturally. You automatically know what to do and your hands just move in that direction, a lot of EUREKA moments happening without any conscious tail of thoughts as if in a leap. A lot of sportsmen and artists have experienced this, scientifically this state is called flow or zone. I have talked about this earlier in my blog posts as well for example when I experience this while playing basketball, coding, etc.
The point though is, people do realize in this hyper conscious state that a LOT of thinking process is actually happening automatically. You have no control over it. Mind creates an illusion that you are the one carrying out all the process but you really are not and we live in this illusion all the time except for those tiny little moments of zone or flow when we actually come to experience the reality. Meditation lets you see just that. You allow yourself to calm down and not interfere with anything what mind is doing. With some practice, you will see all your jumbled up memories, thoughts, fears simply popups up without your permissions and float around. We know this ofcourse by books but after experiencing it live, we finally learn how to control it.
When you realize you are not the one doing most of the things you think you are doing, you are automatically freed from the worry of doing it right. It might come as a setback to the ego but honey you are in this world to do lot more meaningful stuff instead of day-dreaming whole day!
The stress levels increase when we can't accept what is happening and instead desire to make things happen the way we want it. Stress is either worrying about something you can't control of or it is worrying but doing nothing useful as in order to sort that problem. Stress inside body is a safety mechanism to tackle with life and death problems. Imagine you are sitting inside a cave and you hear the voice of a lion. You get afraid, you get stressed, butterflies in your stomach. That's your body signalling to do something about it. So you run. In the present world though, we don't have survival stress very often but body does not know how to react differently to survival stress or emotional stress. It basically lifts up your energy levels preparing you to run. That's why mental capacity becomes decreased and you are unable to concentrate or are easily irritated. That is why it is great to exercise while feeling stressed because it acts as an outlet for the extra energy.
A much bigger problem though is that many people today have become addicted to stress. You don't need to tell them what's wrong. They will see what is there and will automatically find out what's wrong and then stress about it. Yoga/Meditation allows you to observe these mind patterns and to have an ability to control it. Also since you now know you are not the doer again you are freed of most of the stress you feed yourself.
Since meditation improves employee producitivity , corporates are also picking up the trend and actively promoting it. Lot of companies have in house Yoga sessions, instructors and a conducive environment. More and more doctors are recommending Yoga/Meditation for all kinds of diseases. Lot of artists, sports person meditate in order to increase focus. It is also extremely useful for students to beat their exam fear and to increase concentration.
For full read of all the benefits, kindly go through this amazing compilation.
This life-transforming quality of meditation is not all that mysterious – just imagine how your life would change if you spend 45 minutes a day in the greatest relaxation you have ever known, resting more deeply than sleep, giving your body, nervous system, and brain a chance to tune for action.
