Meditation

Since the early 1980s, mindfulness meditation has increasingly found a place in mainstream health care and medicine because of evidence that it's good for emotional and physical health - for example, helping to reduce anxiety, stress, depression, chronic pain, psoriasis, headache, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. Some studies suggest that it can improve immune function. And research has found an association between mindfulness meditation-induced improvements in psychological well-being and increased activity of telomerase, an enzyme important to the long-term health of cells. With advances in neuroimaging, scientists have begun to explore the brain mechanisms that may underlie these benefits.

What is meditation? It is familiarization with a new way of being. We can familiarize ourselves with all sorts of positive qualities this way - kindness, patience, tolerance - and continue to develop them through meditation.

Throughout this exercise, practiced at first on brief but regular sessions, we seek within ourselves a particular quality that we then allow to permeate our entire being until it becomes our second nature. We can also meditate to acquire inner calm by stabilizing the mind through concentration on a subject: a flower, a feeling, an idea. The mind is unstable at first, but then we learn to tame it, just as we would return a butterfly to the flower of concentration every time it flutters away. The goal is not to turn our mind into a dutiful but bored student, but to make it flexible, stable, strong, lucid, vigilant - in short, to make it a better tool for inner transformation instead of abandoning it to its fate as a spoilt child resistant to all learning.

Finally, we can meditate in a non-conceptual way on the very nature of the mind by looking directly at consciousness itself as an open presence, a pure awareness that always lies behind the screen of thoughts, or by contemplating the very nature of the thoughts that cross our minds.

There are many other ways of meditating, but as varied as they are, they all share the common function of being part of the process of inner transformation.

Meditation differs from mere intellectual reflection in that it involves a constantly recurrent experience of the same introspective analysis, the same effort to change, or the same contemplation. It is not about experience some sudden flash of understanding, but about coming to a new perception of reality and of the nature of the mind, about nurturing new qualities until they become an integral part of our being.

Meditation is a skill that requires resolve, sincerity, and patience far more than it does intellectual panache.

Meditation is followed by action, that is, by being applied in everyday life. Of what use is a "great session" of meditation if it doesn't translate into improvement of our whole being, which can then place itself at the service of others? Once the seeds of patience, inner strength , serenity, love and compassion come to maturity, it is to others that we must offer their fruit.

How often do you meditate? We do it daily!

Love,

SOPHIE & Ellie xx

Source: Harvard Medical School

Matthieu Ricard (2015) "Happiness, A guide to developing life's most important skill"