How to Meditate by Jyotish Novak

Author:Jyotish Novak
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781565896215
Publisher: Crystal Clarity Publishers

Meditation and Emotional/Mental States

Meditation has been shown to restore energy levels better than a nap or simple relaxation techniques such as listening to classical music, and also helps with insomnia. Studies show that inner-city residents suffering from chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and hypertension who were trained in meditation showed a 50 percent reduction in overall psychiatric symptoms and a 44 percent reduction in medical symptoms. For those with severe depression, meditation has been shown to reduce their relapse rate by half.

Many studies have suggested that meditation has a significant effect on symptoms of aging, with one study indicating that those who had been meditating for five years or more were as much as twelve years younger than their chronological age as measured by a reduction in blood pressure, better near-point vision, and auditory discrimination.

One extremely significant result of meditation is that it helps people make positive lifestyle changes. It has shown to be very effective in helping people overcome addictions to drugs, alcohol, and smoking, producing larger reductions than either standard substance-abuse programs or prevention programs.

There are significant cultural as well as individual improvements. Meditation helps regulate emotions, enabling people to get along better. For this reason it is now commonly encouraged by a multitude of major corporations who see meditation as a vehicle to improve their bottom line.

The study of meditation and similar practices, while still in its infancy, is rapidly coming into the mainstream. Astonishingly, only a generation ago there was serious debate among physicians about whether diet had any marked effect on health. The situation today is similar concerning meditation. While there may still be a few holdouts who debate its value, the beneficial changes are so profound and widespread that nearly all scientists now accept that meditation is extremely beneficial. Even a little practice of meditation is helpful, as almost all of the benefits occur with a relatively modest practice of a technique such as we’re suggesting in this book.

A friend of ours, Dr. Peter Van Houten, runs a bustling mid-sized clinic in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California. He has been a family physician for over thirty years and has seen thousands of patients during that time. Dr. Van Houten has about five thousand patients, virtually all residing in a relatively small area in the California Gold Country. What makes his practice unique, however, is that about 5 percent of his patients comes from Ananda Village, which is dedicated to the practice of the teachings and techniques presented in this book. This gives him the special opportunity to see firsthand the health benefits of a lifelong practice of meditation and the healthy lifestyle that meditators tend to adopt, compared to the rest of his patients who live in the same geographical area and serve as a sort of “control group.” Here are some of his observations:

1. Typically, the veteran meditators appear and have the physiology of a person that is at least a decade younger than their chronological age—e.g., a sixty-year-old appears to be fifty.

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