Here are the benefits of mindfulness meditation that have many positive effects for you if you are a student, athlete or a common working person.
Our main motive behind writing this article is to help you get motivated to receive the benefits of mindfulness meditation.
Understanding Mindfulness and the Benefits of Mindfulness
Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation Good For You |
In order to properly define the meaning and benefits of mindfulness we think its important to first get a clear picture of the ‘normal’ state of mind for most people.
From the moment you wake up in the morning, you feel like you have an inner voice that chatters away, ceaselessly.
It very much relentlessly talks to you throughout the day, no matter what you do where you goo leaving you with precious little room for inner peace.
Have you seen a person on the streets or on a park bench rambling and mumbling words to himself, incessantly? You may have thought of him as a fool or a strange man crazy even.
But what he is doing is not that different to what most of the other people out there are doing inside their heads all day long. The only difference is they aren’t doing it out showing loud!
Purpose of Mindfulness
Your inner mind tells you in inner voice the things it judges, speculates and commentates and that is your inners soul who to talk what it wants, it dislikes, complains and compares. It constantly worries about, or looks for your soulful fulfillment in, the future.
This inner thought processing mind replays thoughts and beliefs and memories about our past. It jumps from topic to topic in a seemingly random highly chaotic way.
On and on it goes with this the daily continuous compulsive stream of very attentive internal dialogue all day long – until the moment you finally rest your head on the pillow at night and slip into your unconsciousness.
We may think of this as ‘normal’. It seems everyone else around us is in the same way and so perhaps we’ve just come to accept it as ‘just the way life is’.
Imagine if we all had loudspeakers installed in our brains, or a screen implanted on our foreheads to broadcast all our thoughts as they occur! All of a sudden, we would see how dysfunctional this state of mind is.
It may be ‘normal’, as in very common, but it is not the natural state of the mind and to conquer this chaotic stream of inner voices you need to understand the purpose of mindfulness meditation to gain full benefits of mindfulness.
The main purpose of mindfulness meditation is to calm your mind and bring you at peace.
Mindfulness Meditation To Calm The Chaotic Thoughts Process
Many Studies have shown that most people think around more than 40,000 and 60,000 thoughts during a single day.
Interestingly around a total of 96% -98% of these thoughts are said to be the same kind of thoughts we all had yesterday and the day before. So in simpler words we are continuously repeating the same conditioned patterns of thought and belief.
Much of these thinking patterns we never have consciously choose. Many we picked up in our childhood, and today they are just there determining our main class of behavior and coloring our view of the whole world.
In this state our minds can be like records stuck in automatic replay, the same old songs playing over and over again and that is why many recommend the benefits of mindfulness meditation for students as it helps them build up new belief's.
Many people remain badly stuck in this state often referred to as the system of ‘autopilot’ or crazy ‘mindlessness’. Living like this we all just get locked into reactive base mechanical thinking and living like fools that may not serve us and often lead to suffering for ourselves and for others.
So that is why benefits of mindfulness meditation is recommended for all of us by many great spiritual gurus to live a good positive life.
So let us just understand mindfulness in more depth.
What Is Mindfulness?
Let us just state the fact "Mindfulness is the opposite of Mindlessness".
Mindfulness mainly involves the conscious deliberate direction of our full awareness. It is a basic shift out of our autopilot stream of thoughts turned into the moment.
In mindfulness we are always awake and very attentive to what we are experiencing in our present moment without any type of judging or labeling it in any way. It is a very highly alert and yet super peaceful state of being.
The benefits of mindfulness meditation helps us develop a powerful attitude of openness, curiosity and receptivity, we become like an impartial observer of our experience.
Steps To Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness meditation is best to practice in the context of the Buddha’s eight-step success path, which is incredibly simple and clear.
- Right understanding. This step refers to the mainly four noble truths. Right understanding means realizing we do experience suffering because of the lust of desire. When we renounce desire, suffering ceases.
- Right thought. Thoughts of bad anger and jealousy are unworkable, as are all thoughts that emerge from the belief that happiness is the result of base external conditions.
- Right speech is the way to be honest, thoughtful, and kind.
- Rightful action is the way to be ethical, temperate, and non-violent.
- Rightful livelihood just means: Don’t make a living doing any harm to others.
- Right effort refers to the cultivation of inner peace through the preceding steps.
- Right mindfulness means: Remain aware of the basic activity of your body and especially your mind.
- Rightful concentration means : To seek, finds, cultivate, realize, or remember to inherent happiness, stillness, or peace.
Understand that Steps 1–5 are the main path to the relinquishment of desire.
Steps 6–7 are the basic maintenance mode.
Step 8 refers to the pure realization of inner stillness or inner peace.
When we understand desire alone is the cause of our suffering (step 1), we can ignore those thoughts that promote it (step 2).
Without desire, we speak and act very thoughtfully, kindly, peacefully and justly. (Steps 3, 4, and 5).
Right effort and right mindfulness (steps 6 and 7) refer to the correct basic use of our pure inner energy and attention.
Instead of using our energy to manufacture desire, we can focus on renouncing agitated states, caused by the belief that happiness is the result of external conditions.
Instead of focusing our attention on the objects of desire, we can turn inward and focus on inner peace.
Empowering ourselves with Mindfulness Meditation Practice
Benefits of Mindfulness meditation practice also allows us to become the watcher of sense full perceptions, thoughts and emotions as they arise without being caught up in them.
We become what is referred to in the old yogic traditions as the ‘silent powerful witness’ and so we become untangled from the chaotic thought pattern of mind and its habitual reactive patterns.
If you have practiced meditation before, you may notice that what I am describing here sounds a lot like the meditative state of mind. Indeed mindfulness can be considered to be the informal practice of meditation.
Anything that you do in daily life with mindful awareness becomes a type of meditation. In many gurus tell their students that mindfulness is how you take meditation off the cushion and into your daily life.
Any moment of your day is an opportunity to awaken into mindfulness – waiting at the grocery line, having a shower or eating breakfast.
When your practice mindfulness meditation your attention would be fully engaged in the present moment and what ever you were experiencing. You would actually be fully here present in the moment for your breakfast instead of only half living it lost in thinking or doing 3 things at once.
Practicing Mindfulness meditation makes you more Wise
Through living mindfully your able to touch life deeply in every moment.
Perhaps the most significant thing about benefits of mindfulness meditation that it creates some inner space. It allows you a direct experience of your inner spaciousness – the pure consciousness in you that exists prior to thinking.
To be in full touch with that, is to be in touch with true yourself at the deepest possible level. In this state of mindfulness meditation the feelings of happiness, peace, wholeness and fulfilment arise spontaneously from within.
Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation has long been advocated by all the wise men and women as the way to live a good, happy, healthy and rich life.
For many people in the west though, they are only hearing about it now for the first time. There has been an explosion of interest in mindfulness meditation in the past 25 years due to an ever growing body of research into its benefits. As more people try it, and more scientists study it, the positive reports continue to just pour in.
Thanks to this research and exposure from the media, benefits of mindfulness meditation for anxiety cure is moving from the fringes into the mainstream.
In this busy, modern world we live in, we need it more than ever, also the data keeps reinforcing the facts that mindfulness meditation is just what we need to help us not only survive, but thrive, in this day and age.
The Proven Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness has a well documented, vast array of benefits. Its positive and protective affects are proven to benefit us mentally, physically, emotionally and in our relationships with others and the world around us.
The list below shows some of the proven benefits of the mindfulness meditation.
- Reduces anxiety
- Reduces destructive emotions (Mindfulness actually shrinks the right pre-frontal cortex of the brain; this is the part of the brain responsible for so many destructive emotions like fear, unhappiness and anger)
- Reduces Insomnia
- Is effective for pain management
- Increases sense of wellbeing
- The benefits of mindfulness meditation reduces rumination and worry
- It Reduces stress
- Reduces depression (clinically proven to work as good as medication with no side effects!)
- Shown to prevent depression relapse
- Reduces lethargy and increases energy both mentally and physically
- Improves quality of life
- Boosts and sharpens your memory
- Increases focus and attention
- Improves emotional intelligence
- Improves social intelligence
- Improves efficiency
- Creates clearer, more focused thinking
- Improves confidence
- Improves resilience
- Reduces compulsive and addictive tendencies
- Improves relationships
- Develops empathy and compassion
- Boosts leadership skills
- Improves disease resistance
The above benefits of mindfulness meditation works superbly for students, teacher, working people and all the others who are looking or some solace.
Check out Soham meditation benefits.
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