Benefits of Meditation
Meditation has great attractions for a society living on its nerves and subjected to constant change. The popularity of meditation has increased since it was discovered that meditation has great benefits in relieving tension. Meditation is now being used to treat medical conditions such as raised blood pressure, migraine, tension headaches, etc. Among some of the psychological changes observable during meditation are a decrease in respiration rate and in oxygen consumption and a decline in concentration of blood lactate (a chemical that seems to increase when the body is under stress).
The word “meditation” comes from the Latin meditari that means to reflect and to practice. This gives the idea of combining inward-looking thought and awareness of your own mind and body with a regular training process that involves a certain amount of discipline.
Meditation is as old as recorded history in the East. In China and Japan, meditation was closely linked with the religion of Buddhism in its various forms. In Zen Buddhism for example, meditation is aimed at achieving a higher plane of consciousness in which the physical needs are forgotten and man’s spirit perceives essential truth. Many Buddhist monks can slip quickly into a state of serenity and peaceful alertness, and some can even survive burial for several hours. However, the religious content and the emphasis on mental concentration rather than relaxation make these forms of meditation forbidding to regular people.
One type of meditation that has gained popularity is yoga. The word “yoga” is taken from the Sanskrit word that means to bind or yoke together. Yoga has many different forms, each with a different aim. The most popular form of yoga in the West is Hatha yoga. This unisex yoga claims to enable both men and women to gain complete control of mind and body.