Developing a regular meditation practice helps liberate you from reacting to trouble with fear, anxiety, and panic. Meditation grounds you in the present moment. A place of calm being, not fearing – an interior space where you can then focus on what needs to be done. Sometimes this can be done best through the practice of contemplative meditation.
This article will explore not only the benefits of meditation but also introduce you to some of the science and metaphysics behind meditation.
Benefits Of Meditation In Times Of Trouble
In times of trouble, such as going through a painful divorce, a common reaction is to stress out and lose focus. We try to compose ourselves by repressing our fear and anxiety, but that only makes matters worse, when what we need is to reframe our perspective on what we are experiencing. A new way of being in how we face our challenges. This is why developing a meditation practice is so valuable.
Let’s begin with how many of us react to life-changing trouble
Q. I am a 36-year-old working mom. I lost my job about six months ago when the company I worked for filed for bankruptcy. Unemployment insurance is not available because I was considered an independent contractor. My husband’s salary is not enough to meet all our financial obligations. It feels like we are in free fall.
Without my income, we go deeper into debt each month, and our emergency savings rapidly deplete. For the first time in my life, I am late on bills and am receiving collection calls. I feel nervous all the time and can’t seem to get focused. I had started to take sleeping pills and found myself waking up in the morning more tired than when I went to sleep the night before. It feels like I’m falling to pieces. Advice?
A. For most people, almost without exception, suddenly losing one’s job is a profoundly destabilizing event and can be so emotionally charged it fills your body with stress and anxiety. A condition that can often lead to depression.
You can feel like your whole life is falling apart. There can also be feelings of guilt that you have let the ones you love down. Compound all this with collection calls from strangers whose primary objective is to make your life miserable.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that you don’t have to be the victim of your fears. But first, you must believe there is always the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Why should you believe this? Because there is, and there always will be. It’s how the Universe operates. But in the meantime, there are things you can do right now that will stop the madness. It’s called learning and developing a practice of meditation.
Finding Your Rhythm Through Meditation
Protecting our emotional reserves
When you meditate, you will remember that there is a rhythm to life and that this rhythm is bigger and stronger than you. So instead of fighting it, which will only exhaust your precious emotional reserves, learn to go with it, indeed, surrender to it and let yourself become the rhythm. This may sound a bit new age, yet this is essential to the practice of meditation.
You might think taking up meditation is a way of escaping reality. You might be saying to yourself, “Are you kidding?” This is no time to relax. I’m in crisis mode here. I need to find a new job now before we lose everything!”
This is a typical response to life-changing financial trouble, but consider this, when you meditate, you replace the madness you’re going through with sanity.
Meditation And Your Emotional Wellbeing
If you don’t take care of your emotional well-being now, you will likely face much more difficulty finding that new job. Prospective employers can sense anxiety and desperation – no matter how good you think you are at hiding it. How you feel about yourself and your situation will come through in your job interviews. And let’s face it, who wants to hire a nervous wreck?
Meditation Helps You Flatten Peaks And Valleys
So how does one deal with life’s peaks and valleys? Through quiet acceptance. Life has peaks and valleys. Joy and sorrow are merely opposite sides of the same coin.
True, life does bring us hard times, but it also brings us easy times. You cannot have one without the other. The trick is to drop this notion that one day when you have everything you need to be happy, you will finally arrive and no longer suffer through life’s troubles.
Sorry, but that is not life. That is just a program we keep running through our heads. The program is based on the belief that if we could only get that big house, be a bit thinner, drive the right car, and marry the right guy or gal, we will finally find that happiness we have worked so hard to achieve.
Meditation Helps You Give Up Fearful Thoughts
In truth, happiness does not exist until you let go believing that you need to be happy to be, well, happy. It sounds paradoxical because it is paradoxical. This way of thinking turns us into the proverbial dog that spends its life chasing its own tail.
Meditation Will Help You Free Yourself From Repatative And Fearful Thoughts
The first step out of this nutty self-defeating endless loop is to get yourself out of your head and stop letting your fearful thoughts control your emotions. Meditation will help you do just that. You will learn that you are not your thoughts. You are the one who observes your thoughts.
Meditation liberates you from thoughts so that you can experience who you are. And who is that person, you might ask? You. The observer of your thoughts. The one who is the witness of your thoughts. Meditation teaches you that you are not your thoughts; it only seems that way.
It gets even stranger. Not only are you, not your thoughts, you are not even the thinker. A growing number of scientists, including. Nobel prize-winning physicist Sir Roger Penrose and a myriad of mystics from every religious tradition throughout history have believed the soul to be a form of non-physical energetic intelligence rather than a by-product of the brain.
In other words, it is believed that who we are at our deepest essence, is the observer of our thoughts, emotions, and sensory perceptions. Sometimes thought of as the interior silent witness to our lives.
Mindful Meditation – Being The Silent Witness
Meditation And The Brain
A brain is an organic machine – a type of supercomputer; it categorizes and manages billions of bits of information, receives, stores, and regulates your five sense perceptions, and thousands upon thousands of other functions vital to your survival.
It is hypothesized that one of the brain’s functions is that of a radio receiver that can tune into subatomic frequencies. Specifically, the subatomic frequency we know as consciousness.
Understanding Meditation From Different Perspectives
Whether or not you agree with such theories, understanding them will assist you in developing a more robust meditation practice. The importance of quieting your mind and separating yourself from your thoughts is key to a deeper and fuller understanding of meditation.
Watching Yourself Watch Your Thoughts
When you begin meditation, you practice the art of watching yourself watch your thoughts. Then, you move your attention to watching yourself watch your thoughts. In time, you will realize there is an inner self that dwells deep within us. A place of peace where thoughts come and go, but which have no effect on you. No worries. It is perfect stillness. It is the present moment acknowledging itself as the present moment, unattached and free from the chaos of reactive thinking and the emotions they produce.
As your meditation practice grows, you will realize that the present moment is the only moment that counts. That’s because the present moment is infinite and beyond time.
So many people spend so much time worrying about the future or regretting the past. But both are thought forms – the only real moment is the present one. This is what meditation helps you understand. But there are many other benefits.
Immediate Benefits Of Meditation
- Gain a new perspective on life
- Learn how to release stress
- Bring focus into your life
- Increase awareness
- Learning how to choose rather than react
- Eliminate negative emotions
- You bring peace into your life
When you can bring these qualities into your life, you will be open to finding what your soul has been truly searching for and with it a renewed purpose to your life.
