Oakville Zen Meditation
Evidence-based beneficial effects of mindfulness meditation. A 2024 update
Mindfulness meditation has nothing to do with sitting relaxed and daydreaming about this or that.
The practice of mindfulness meditation is simple but demanding:
focusing, in a mindful way, on a target, such as our breathing to anchor our wandering mind forcing it to slow down. When a thought occurs, acknowledge it, then go back to the anchor. Simple but demanding. Rather than being controlled by our mind 24/7 as usual, meditation is our mind control tool and has significant health benefits effects as described below.
How does mindfulness meditation work?
Zillions of years ago, in addition to their spiritual positive experience, our ancestors realized the beneficial health effects of meditation. How? Our brain-mind, like muscles, has an incredible capacity to regenerate and adapt to many required tasks.
It is now called neuroplasticity, during which the brain-mind can rewire its neuronal cells and pathways according to demands. Mindfulness meditation acts positively on neuroplasticity.
All of meditation's health benefits are listed below and are related to this neural adaptability.
The 4 main objectives of mindfulness meditation are:
1- Modulate, tame, and eventually control our reactive emotional mind.
2- Enhance our cognitive capabilities.
3- Improve our physical well-being
4- Realize what we call “ Spiritual Awakening”. This is beyond this talk.
Mental health benefits:
1- Emotional benefits:
Mindfulness meditation enhances our awareness, acceptance, and control of the frequency and intensity of our emotional reactions when they appear, whether positive or negative, such as anger, guilt, anxiety excitement, etc... It is, therefore, highly effective in controlling stress.
How does meditation work on our emotional mind?
By becoming a better mental modulator, and controller within our emotional neuronal networks
we become more resilient against stressors achieving better serenity, and equanimity.
2- Cognitive benefits 4
1- Better analytic skills
Meditation improves concentration, attention span, judgment, and decision.
2- Improved memory
3- Slow down our age-related Cognitive Decline.
4- Improved self-awareness.
Being more conscious of what is happening around us, our body, emotional state, and cognitive activity. This is part of mind control.
Physical health benefits: 4
1- Lower Blood Pressure
Mindfulness meditation can help reduce blood pressure, which may lower the risk of heart disease
2-Chronic pain reduction
Mindfulness-based approaches have been shown to help reduce chronic pain and improve pain management
3 -Improved Sleep
4- Enhanced our Immune defense functions:
Current research suggests mindfulness may boost immune system functioning, potentially helping people recover more quickly from infection-related illness
3- Societal skills:
As a consequence of the emotional, and cognitive benefits, people practicing mindfulness meditation
exhibit better interpersonal skills, and relationships such as listening, patience, and empathy.
4- “Existential” understanding:
The ongoing practice of meditation helps us differentiate the genuine reality of life from our mind-made virtual world, which is made up of delusion and illusion, as well as many of our beliefs, opinions, and judgments.
Here are a few words about the effects of meditation on our brain structure, and pathways:
Advanced functional neuro-imaging has shown:
1-Mindfulness meditation activates neuroplasticity by creating new neural pathways moving the activities of the neurons away from our reptilian brain center of our emotion towards our cognitive, and rational ones such as our frontal lobes.
2-Increased Gray Matter
Functional MRI has found that regular meditation is associated with increased gray matter density in brain regions involved in learning, memory, analysis, judgment, decision-making, and emotion regulation.
How to practice?....................
Conclusion
This 20,000-year-old oriental mind control exercise requires understanding, trust, discipline, determination, time, patience, and a contemplative non-judgmental approach regardless of how you perceive the quality of your meditation. Its practice is cumulative. Thanks Arnaud
