MEDITATION: History

From East to West

Although there’s a paucity of recorded history on meditation, its roots travel back to ancient times. Researchers speculate that primitive hunter-gatherer societies may have discovered meditation and its altered states of consciousness while staring at the flames of their fires. Over thousands of years, meditation evolved into a structured practice. Indian scriptures called “tantras” mentioned meditation techniques 5000 years ago.
Buddha, “one of history’s major proponents of meditation,” (meditationcenter.com) and a major meditation icon, first made his mark around 500 B.C. His teachings were spread far and wide across the Asian continent. Separate countries or cultures adopted different forms of the word “meditation,” and they each found their own unique way of practicing it. Buddhist- and Hindu-based Easter-style meditation practices are still the most popular today.
Meditation was spread to Western society thousands of years after it was adopted in the East. It finally started to gain popularity in the West in the mid-20th century. In the 1960s and 1970s, many professors and researchers began testing the effects of meditation and learned about its multitude of benefits.

Benefits of Meditation

Meditation is a practice that gives balance physically, emotionally and mentally. Today, people are using meditation to treat anxiety, stress, and depression. The “deep rest” meditation gives a person dissolves stress and enables him or her to makes better choices through clear thinking. Those who meditate report higher levels of self-esteem. The practice has also been used to help people quit smoking, conquer drug and alcohol addictions, reduce blood pressure and reduce symptoms of pre-menstrual syndrome and menopause. Meditation aids in lowering heart rate and blood pressure by slowing down breathing, which reduces the amount of oxygen needed. Along with the mind, muscles gently relax. “Some experts have compared it to a ‘reset button’ for your body.” (“Meditation as Medication”)
However, meditation shouldn’t be used as a replacement to traditional Western medicine, but as a supplement to treatments your doctor has recommended for you.
Through experiments and tests using practiced meditators, Herbert Benson, M.D., a professor at Harvard Medical School, discovered that meditation counteracts the effects of the sympathetic nervous system – the one that gives humans the desire to fight or flee in any conflict situation. While primitive people needed this response in hunting situations, today it is the reason for many of our everyday stresses. During meditation, blood flow is directed to the parasympathetic nervous system instead. This is the part of the brain that triggers relaxation, a slower pulse and energy conservation – the opposite of the sympathetic nervous system.
Many studies are still being conducted about the effects of meditation. As more scientific knowledge is gathered, meditation will become a more accurately and frequently prescribed treatment.

Psychological Benefits

• reduced stress and anxiety
• increased creativity and intelligence
• reduced depression
• increased learning ability, moral
  reasoning and memory
• reduced irritability and moodiness
• feelings of vitality and rejuvenation
• increased emotional control
• increased self-esteem
• increased alertness
• improved relationships
• improved concentration

Physiological Benefits

• may help lower blood pressure
• prevented, slowed or controlled pain
  of chronic diseases
• boosted immune system
• lowered cholesterol levels
• improved airflow, especially in those
  with asthma
• younger biological age

Meditation Techniques

There are a wide variety of meditation techniques available, some for specific purposes and others just variations with the same ultimate purpose. However, two main categories comprise all forms. These are concentrative meditation and mindfulness meditation.

Concentrative Meditation

“Concentrative meditation focuses the attention on the breath, an image or a sound, in order to still the mind and allow a greater awareness and clarity to emerge. This is like a zoom lens in a camera; we narrow our focus to a selected field” (1stholistic.com) Sitting and silently focusing on dynamics of breathing is concentrative meditation in its most basic form. Breathing is a natural and readily available object of meditation. When a person is anxious or alarmed, his breathing becomes “shallow, rigid and uneven”. But when the mind is tranquil and balanced in concentration, breathing becomes slow, deep and even. Absorbing yourself in the repetition of your breathing will allow you to reach a point of simultaneous stillness and awareness.

Mindulness Meditation

Mindfulness meditation’s purpose is to increase awareness of the inundation of “sensations and feelings” around oneself, but at a distance. In mindfulness meditation, you experience every aspect of your environment without consciously thinking about it. “The person sits quietly and simply witnesses whatever goes through the mind, not reacting or becoming involved with thoughts, memories worries or images.” (1stholistic.com) Through this practice, meditators are said to gain an intense calmness and clarity.