Meditation improves mental and physical tness

Stress is an inevitable experience here in Trinidad and Tobago. It comes in many forms, and how we deal with stress is where the challenge is. If there is a challenge, then there has to be a way to respond to and resist the demand being imposed upon the mind.

This is where mental fitness comes into play. Just like our body can be trained to get stronger, faster, flexible and well balanced, so too can the mind be trained. The technique has been practiced for thousands of years.

Meditation Meditation can make you less stressed, happier and healthier than ever. How we handle our challenges daily can be the difference between emotional chaos and metal clarity. Recent studies have shown that deep breathing and clearing the mind can reduce stress, obsessive over thinking which leads to anxiety.

Meditation can also improve your memory and slow the aging process.

What exactly is considered meditation? Meditation often conjures up an image of a bearded guru sitting cross-legged at the entrance to a cave or at the top of a mountain. But meditation is fast becoming mainstream, and people from all walks of life practice it - businessmen and women, housewives, lawyers, doctors, students, teachers and so on. Also, modern technology has given us easier ways of both monitoring and performing meditation.

There are four type of meditation • Concentrative meditation which draws focus to a single object, sound, breathing pattern or image.

• Open Awareness meditation is being present and aware if whatever is happening in and around you.

• Mindfulness meditation is a combination of concentrative and awareness that can even extend to everyday tasks and exercise.

• Guided meditation is any form of meditation that is guided by a teacher (like a yoga instructor) or recording.

Benefits:

• Meditation can ease physical complaints such as premenstrual syndrome (PMS), tension headaches and other common health problems affecting women

• When you meditate regularly, you dramatically reduce your body’s response to stress

• Meditation can also improve irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, high blood pressure and insomnia, among other stress-related conditions

• Meditation can help prevent or treat stress-related complaints such as anxiety, headaches and bone, muscle and joint problems

• Meditation also provides women with an inner sense of clarity and calm, and that in itself may help ward off certain illnesses

• People who underwent eight weeks of meditation training produced more antibodies to a flu vaccine and showed signs of increased activity in areas of the brain related to positive emotion than individuals who did not meditate

• Meditation has been found to be an effective treatment for insomnia. Several studies have shown that regular meditation results in higher blood levels of melatonin, a hormone that plays a critical role in the regulation of sleep

• Meditation produces comprehensive improvements in mental health, enhancing positive features and reducing various forms of psychological distress I know many of us have stressful lives so it could only help improve the quality of life if we are better managers of our mental and physical health. In a nutshell, science confirms the experience of millions of practitioners: meditation will keep you healthy, help prevent multiple diseases, make you happier, and improve your performance in basically any task, physical or mental. However, in order to experience most of these benefits you need to practice meditation consistently, so let’s take a break and meditate.