Your brain on Meditation

Science has proven that meditation is an extremely healthy activity for your brain.  Studies have shown that meditating can actually restructure the brain and train it to concentrate better.  Meditation can also help the brain to have greater compassion, cope better with stress and help to positively influence the problems related to high blood pressure. 

 In Yoga there is asana, which is the physical practice, then there is Prana, which is the practice of breath work.  When you put the two together you get a full practice.  By following the breath with the movement as is done in Vinyasa yoga, you become entrenched in what is meditation.  You mind stops its obsessing and churning and begins to slow down.  The mind is now turning its outward attention toward an inner peaceful swaying of breath.  Then something magical begins to happen, the mind becomes more serene and slows the thoughts.

Meditation that is done as a practice or a sitting practice can be a bit intimidating, but it can profoundly alter the experience of life.  Many years ago the father of yoga Patanjali, and the Buddha both taught that meditation could eliminate suffering of the mind.  They were also teaching that an untamed mind could destroy ones life.  Meditation teaches students to cultivate focused attention, and a feeling of internal peace. 

Some meditation students and gurus believe that it can surely help to eliminate suffering by changing ones mental powers and emotional patterns by regularly experiencing meditative states.  The second yoga Sutra – Yoga citta vritti nirodhah- means that yoga is the ending of disturbances of the mind.

Studies now state that yoga done even in small doses can remodel the structure of the brain. In a study done by the department of Neurology at the University of California at Los Angeles’s School of Medicine, they looked for evidence using an MRI machine of the changes in the brain.  Science once believed that the brain reaches its peak in adulthood and then never changes then in late adulthood it declines. But the study found a profound difference between meditators and non-meditators, the conclusions were published in the journal of Neuro-Imaging in 2009.  The study compared 22 meditators and 22 non-meditators.

The findings found that meditators who practiced a wide variety of meditation traditions and had between 5 to 46 years of meditation experience had more gray matter in the part of the brain that is important for attention, emotion regulation and mental flexibility.  This meant that these meditators had the ability to more effectively control these parts of the brain.

More and more researchers are finding that your brain on meditation is a changing brain.  The structure of the brain changes in way the enables it to be more creative, and to enhance attention and have an enhanced capacity to handle emotions more efficiently.

Your brain on Meditation while doing a mantra and or the breath can restructure itself to make concentration easier and help with the analyzing and creative problem solving.  When you practice calm acceptance type of meditation the brain will become more resilient to stress and can lower blood pressure.  When you practice love and compassion in meditation your brain will develop in a way that will allow you to be more spontaneous in feeling connected to others.  When you practice gratitude meditation your brain will develop in a way that will allow you to have the ability to be more compassionate and once again lower blood pressure.  When you meditate your brain will change and your brain on meditation will create lasting positive health effects.