the feeling that we have the energy to adapt and handle life’s trials. Research has shown that our brains actually become more robust after undertaking this type of training.
Neuroreport published research undertaken by Sara Lazar and her team at Harvard indicating that the areas of the brain linked with attention, interoception, and sensory processing (including the prefrontal cortex and right-anterior insular cortex) were thicker in participants who meditated than in control participants. There were distinct differences in the prefrontal cortical thickness of older participants between the two groups, directly associated with meditation, which indicates that meditation might delay the cortical thinning that occurs in the aging process. This research offered the first scientific evidence of cortical elasticity linked to meditation practice.8 This basically means that your brain becomes tougher or more resilient, which can help counter the effects of aging as you grow older. This is a good thing to bear in mind if you want to age gracefully.
Why Counting Your Breaths Is Better than Counting Calories
Jean L. Kristeller and C. Brendan Hallett, from the psychology department at Indiana State University, investigated the efficacy of meditation for binge eating disorder (BED). Results suggest that meditation and mental training may be effective components in decreasing both frequency and severity of binge-eating episodes in persons with BED. Reported binges decreased to a quarter of what they were for people who undertook the meditation training.9 When you have a sense of control over your impulses, all sorts of binges will decrease — so, yes, meditation can help you lose weight as well.
Faster Healing
Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues from the University of Massachusetts published research in many journals, including the American Journal of Psychiatry and Journal of Behavioral Medicine, indicating that patients heal four times faster if they meditate; cancer patients who practiced meditation had significantly better emotional outlooks than a control group; and not only did meditation relieve symptoms in patients with anxiety and chronic pain but the benefits also continued for up to four years after training.10 So it’s not merely about keeping a positive outlook but, rather, getting the brain into a state where a positive outlook is natural. Health and well-being will follow.
Significant research has been conducted on meditation and its effects in many areas of life. As a result, increasing numbers of psychologists and physicians are incorporating it into their treatment regimes with great success. But why wait until we are sick? Mental resilience, including meditation, is a proven preventive and a way of creating lasting happiness.
Self-Awareness: Knowing Your Body
Mental Resilience Training focuses directly on the body. The goal in meditation is to become keenly aware of each and every one of your sensations. This can help you in many ways.
A simple example is being attuned to the feeling of fullness when you eat, which probably prevents overeating. (Of course, not all meditators are at their optimal weight, but for some, merely reducing calorie intake can be a significant achievement.)
Sensual Awareness
A common misperception is that meditators deprive themselves of sensory stimulus because they sit in a room without music, talking, or movement and are therefore denying themselves an important part of life. In fact, the opposite is true: meditators are generally more sensual and comfortable with the full range of sensory experiences than other people.
It is good to realize that, sometimes, decreasing sensory stimuli can be what a person needs. Normally we get so much stimulation that we cannot fully appreciate what we touch, eat, see, smell, or hear. Imagine going into a shop to find a perfume you like. By the time you get to the fourth or fifth perfume, you are so overloaded with input that your nose shuts down and nothing smells distinctive. This overload happens most of the time, in different ways, to all of our senses.
Ultimately it wears us out! However, through meditation you can shut out the daily bombardment (noise, TV, advertisements, all manner of sensory overload) and find mental quietness. When you are no longer inundated, you will be able to experience heightened pleasure from whatever engages your senses. So when you eat, you can focus your awareness on taste with much more precision. When you hug a loved one, your mental clarity allows you to enjoy every tender caress. You will be able to truly focus and enjoy all that your senses experience.
How Mental Resilience Training Enhances Your Love Life
We all know how to fall in love, but unfortunately not many of us know how to stay in love. Knowing how to listen is critical for staying connected and remaining in love. However, the mental chatter going around in our heads can make it difficult to focus on our partners. Also, heightened levels of clarity allow us to connect to our own emotions and our partners’. Practicing focus and clarity ensures that we keep love alive in our relationships.
Improved Listening Skills
Imagine that you have just joined your partner after a hard day’s work looking after the kids or dealing with your boss, and you start a conversation. Your mind will likely still be processing information, decisions, and conversations from your day. You might get a glazed look in your eye, leading your partner to ask, “Are you really listening?”
The truth is, you’re probably not. You aren’t really present because you couldn’t put down the thoughts wandering through your mind. Mental Resilience Training will increase your ability to listen with “unconditional presence, which is just being with what is, open and interested, without agenda.”11 This type of listening is very powerful. Your companion starts feeling connected to you, which opens up many avenues for the relationship to develop and deepen.
Emotional Awareness
Experienced meditators can pinpoint their emotions more immediately and accurately. Whatever they feel — whether joy, sadness, depression, or grief — they can understand and face with the appropriate intensity. Acknowledging all of your emotions (as opposed to denying or trying to numb them with too much comfort food or alcohol) is a sign of healthiness.
Emotional awareness means knowing when feelings are present in others and ourselves. This is obviously critical in relationships, especially when entering a new relationship. Most people start relationships with emotional baggage from previous relationships. Often we are not aware of the emotions that we carry around with us, and this can cause misunderstandings or defensiveness.
Through meditation we learn to notice, acknowledge, label, and accept all of our emotions. As we become aware, we can stop carrying around what is no longer useful to us, and in letting such things go, we feel lighter and happier, and become easier to be around.
Mental Resilience Training has a number of benefits that can enhance your work, health, and relationships. Meditation helps you make fundamental and positive changes in your life, not through willpower, which can wax and wane, but through awareness. A meditation teacher offers the following reason for learning to meditate:
You can’t make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now. As soon as you do that, changes flow naturally. You don’t have to force or struggle or obey rules dictated to you by some authority. You just change. It is automatic.
GUNARATNA
There are so many times in our lives when we just cannot understand the right course of action. Sometimes we flit from one activity to another, without achieving anything in particular. We sometimes assume that if we keep doing various things, we will stumble onto the right path. Instead we often create more agitation and pain for ourselves.
The
