Using Meditation for Health
As a tool, meditation for health is powerful. Meditation helps the body to relax. Thus it relieves stress. Additionally, it lowers blood pressure. These include the most obvious of its physical benefits.
I must address the confusion that some people have about meditation. Some think it’s prayer. Meditation is not prayer, unless you make it so. Similarly, breathing is not prayer, but it can be used in prayer and as prayer, if you make it so. Breath control, prayer, relaxation and meditation can all go together. Or they can be done separately. This article goes into more detail to define their differences and similarities.
Defining Meditation for Health
Wikipedia has a great definition: “Meditation is a practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.” And the end of that hits upon the power in meditation for health. It helps you to have a clear mind and to become more calm and emotionally stable.
Meditation for Health Improves Balance and Stability
When I think of emotional stability, I think of balance. My previous blog, Health through Balance talks about the various ways that Okinawan elders keep balance in their long, active, healthy lives. They regularly use meditation for health, among many other things. You could say it is one leg on a table. And the more legs that a table has, the more stable it will be, the better its ability to hold up under pressure.
As the Wikipedia definition says, meditation can be simply focusing on a single thought. However, because of my yoga practice, I naturally include breath control when doing most types of meditation. I have learned to do this automtically. And breath control itself has stress-relieving, blood pressure regulating health benefits. So when you put the two together, breath control and meditation for health become way more powerful.
-Jenifer Tull-Gauger