LILAPA'S 10 REASONS FOR MEDITATING

1. Be happier

One of the great secrets of meditation is that as your mind becomes more concentrated, your experience becomes happier. The more aware you are of each moment, the more enjoyment you can find in your experience. In our culture, we are often left with a ‘default setting’ of vague anxiety and incompleteness. Meditation can help change this to a ‘default setting’ of happiness and acceptance.

2. Be more creative

Meditation can help you be more aware of your conditioning, of the many influences that cause you to think, feel or behave in certain ways. This understanding often has the immediate effect of reducing ‘knee jerk’ reactions in a habitual way. Not responding in a habitual way leaves more opportunity to respond in a creative way. Ultimately, meditation helps to overcome habit patterns that limit us.

3. Be kinder to yourself

We are what we are, regardless of how we think or feel about it. Lots of our conditioning is about liking some parts of ourselves and disliking other parts. Whilst it is good to aspire to improve ourselves, it is much better to do this in a kindly way and it is more likely to work. Meditation can help you to welcome all of your experience and not judge or deny parts of it.

4. Be more away of others

Opening up to our own experience in a kindly way is a good basis for being more aware of others, both those near to us and those strangers who briefly pass through our lives. With people we know well we may only see in them what we expect to see. If we see them afresh, we can experience them more deeply and relate to them better. With strangers our perception may be clouded by habitual or stereotypical ways of seeing. If we approach strangers in a more open way we may make better connections.

5. Be more relaxed in the body and calm in the mind

Calm is under-rated and activity is over-rated. As our mind settles down, our body also relaxes and feels and performs better. The more you meditate the more deeply this sense of peace and relaxation spreads out into every aspect of your life.

6. Keep perspective better

Meditation allows you to feel a sense of inner space which naturally gives a better perspective on concerns, worries and difficulties. If these things don’t seem so threatening it is easier to find constructive solutions rather than being mentally ‘chased’ around.

7. Have more ‘peak’ experience

Sometimes things just seem to come together and we have an experience of nature, a work of art or a sporting moment that is ‘special’. Perhaps because we are more present in that moment we recognise something more complete in our experience. These experiences need not be random. Meditation can help to give every activity some of that same enjoyable, focussed attention. The peaks may then appear to be higher but the valleys also rise, until the quality of our experience generally is what we might once have called a peak.

8. Be more sensitive, grounded and balanced

As your experience of a more stable ‘core’ deepens, it has the effect of countering the many fears and insecurities of life. External circumstances have much less of an influence upon our mind, we don’t get so wound up or stirred up by them.

9. Handle difficult situations better

It is easy to be glib in this area, but meditation does seem to help us with the really hard times in our lives, such as bereavement. Even when your mind rises up in a storm of pain – and reaction to pain – there are ways to ‘dig yourself out’.

10. Experience the spiritual dimensions

Meditation opens us to the richness of our experience of each fleeting moment. It allows us to see through the veil of distorted perceptions and beliefs to the reality of ourselves and the world around us. If we can experience ourselves deeply, wordlessly and more completely in meditation, then perhaps there is no limit upon us seeing ourselves and things as the really are.

Adapted from Chapter 7, pages 141 – 150 Buddhism for Dummies. J Landaw & S Bodian. Wiley Publishing 2003

Man’s Search for Meaning. Viktor E Frankl. Rider Publishing 2004