In the busy modern life many people live, many people wonder why meditation is important.
“Why should I do it when I have so many other obligations?”
It’s an understandable question.
The answer is in the question.
It’s because you have SO MANY THINGS going on that you need time to stop and receive the benefits of meditation.
What are the benefits?
Many.
At the bottom of this post, I’ve linked to the National Institutes of Health. They have a wonderful page that summarizes a whole bunch of studies. You can go there to see where science is in affirming the importance of meditation and where it isn’t.
Honestly, the science on this is all over the place.
However, I’ll talk about the state of our culture as I see it and why regular meditation is critical, and the best way to really understand the benefits of regular meditation will be to do it.
Over-stimulated and Exhausted
People are exhausted.
I recently wrote a post about burn out, and burn out is a form of mental and emotional exhaustion.
We are doing, consuming, and stimulating too much.
It’s not fun. Much of it is not necessary, but we’re caught in this nasty feedback loop.
We need rest.
One of the least controversial points about meditation is that it is restful. It is a wait to break the loop of constantly doing.
Wait.
Are you one of those people who doesn’t feel restful when you meditate?
That’s most likely because of how over stimulated your body is. You’re going to need more time to go through a kind of stimulation detox before you will feel rested.
Additionally, muscles and ligaments that are not in good shape for sitting meditation benefit from full-range of motion activities and yoga to help the body feel physically comfortable in sitting.
And all of that is really important.
Because when we don’t rest and care for ourselves, we feel even worse.
Rejuvenating Ourselves
Regular meditation is rejuvenating. It’s a time to stop doing things for at least 30 minutes.
Not 5 minutes in our your app.
Your body barely noticed anything happened in that short of time.
Also, it needs to be silent. The fact that your mind is screaming at you is a
sign of over-stimulation.
You need between 20 and 30 minutes of silent meditation possibly longer depending on the stimulation detox you need to go through.
And doing all of this helps your body rest and repair your nervous system, brain, and so forth. That is healing and rejuvenating.
More Exhaustion in Modern Culture
We have to accept that our culture is off-course. It is making people sick with all kinds of mismatch diseases, and more are coming as we introduce more stresses upon the human body.
What’s a mismatch disease? This book explains more:
The intensity and over-stimulation of an increasingly demanding culture makes meditation critical in our self-care.
There is only so much one person can do to change amidst a culture, but we do have the power to meditate–to calm our minds and nervous systems. We have the power to rest, and it is a power we absolutely have to make space for if we want to safeguard our long-term health and sanity.
