The Many Benefits of Meditation

This was written December 28, 2011. There are many mental and physical benefits of meditation. Some say stress is worse for health than anything. Meditation greatly helps to reduce stress. Reducing stress also means an expansion of happiness. To go back to a previous website you were on, you can right click onto the Back button to see a list of them.

To find the section on this website that meditation was under I had to go to Health, then Alternative and Natural Medicine and under that was Meditation. I searched this website for meditation before writing this and saw a webpage about the benefits of transcendental meditation. But the benefits on that are mostly the same for any meditation and also for yoga. Some people regard yoga postures as a meditation in motion like tai chi.

I have been doing yoga since age 12. Also at that age was doing tai chi and martial arts. You will find that the positive emotions all tend to stick together and the negative emotions tend to stick together. So along with stress you usually have anxiety and fear and similar emotions. In the Star Wars movie Yoda says "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Meditation is great for people who need more creativity like artists, writers and business owners.

Then the less of these negative emotions you have then the more positive emotions that you have like peace, love and happiness. At the core of a human being you have the greatest experience that a human being can have. There you have all these positive emotions to an infinite degree. Also these positive emotions have no opposite side since they do not come from the physical world.

In the physical world you have love that deals with people and relationships. Many times an intense love for someone leads to or is integrated with a strong hate for someone. Whereas the love that you feel from mediation is not about people but about your true nature or what you are. It is also called the original self or true self or Self.

I guess one of the most popular benefits of meditation is self-confidence or self-esteem-1. What is self-esteem-1? It is different than self-esteem-2. If you look up self-esteem in a dictionary it explains that self-esteem-1 is like feeling good about yourself, while self-esteem-2 is like a feeling of arrogance like what Adolf Hitler had.

Many English words have multiple meanings. For example is sugar healthy for you? Now you can get many different answers for this with people assuming that sugar means only one thing. But sugar-1a is unhealthy whereas sugar-1b is healthy for you. Sugar-1a is added sugar and sugar-1b is the sugar naturally inside foods like different fruits and nuts.

Transcendental Meditation is popular among celebrities. The Beatles learned it decades ago. But more recently there is Russel Brand who married Katy Perry, who is promoting it. “I’ve been practicing Transcendental Meditation most of my life. I think that does something to your nervous system. It has given me a calmness I don’t think I had at 19.” —Jerry Seinfeld, Source: Philadelphia Inquirer.

As far as many benefits, you could use one word to include everything that everyone wants and that is happiness. You could say that happiness or inner peace is the purpose of life. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is the founder of transcendental meditation. He says "Life finds its purpose and fulfillment in the expansion of happiness." The Dalai Lama said "I believe that the very purpose of life is to seek happiness."

Aristotle says "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence." Sigmund Freud said:

The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one.... We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their behaviour to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so.

It looks like this article is turning into a topic about the purpose of life. There are many different types of meditation just like there are different types of yoga, In fact in Hindi raja, means king. Raja yoga means the the yoga of meditation and it is said to be the king of the types of yoga. Doing the postures of yoga is called hatha yoga.

Currently in the U.S. it costs an adult $1,500 to learn Transcendental Meditation (TM). For full time students it costs $750. The economy in the U.S. is worse than ever. For 2011: A staggering 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be "low income" or are living in poverty. Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be "low income" or impoverished. The average cost to buy a house in Detroit is $6,000 or the same cost for 4 adults to learn TM.

Child homelessness in the United States is now 33 percent higher than it was back in 2007. Since 2007, the number of children living in poverty in the state of California has increased by 30 percent. A higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty (6.7%) than has ever been measured before. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 18 percent of all homes in the state of Florida are sitting vacant. That figure is 63 percent larger than it was just ten years ago.

I have been doing a meditation called Self Knowledge or Knowledge for many years. It is free to learn. The teacher of it is Prem Rawat. Here is a 7 minute video clip by Prem Rawat about why it is free to learn. Watching this video inspired me to write this article.

There is a big difference between something costing $1,500 and something being free. In the first minute, Prem Rawat does not tell the believers and non-believers "No!" I thought that and was wondering what it was referring to. He says "Know!" (like instead of believing). For more information on this meditation see WOPG (Words of Peace Global).

For more information about celebrities that do meditation and what kind of meditation that they do, see 29 Celebrities That Do Meditation. This list includes Al Gore, Dr. Oz, Oprah Winfrey, Sir Paul McCartney (he is a knight), Ringo Starr, Demi Moore, Tiger Woods, Madonna, Arnold Schwarzennegar and more.