Four Ultra-Practical Life-Changing Benefits of Meditation
The meditation and spirituality community has its own special jargon for describing the plus points of dedicated spiritual practice.
And when long-term practitioners discuss the deep end of the pool, the language can become downright incomprehensible.
Result? The practice of meditation — which is simple — is shrouded in mystery, myth and mysticism.
It’s understandable. The reality is that meditation opens up new, ineffable worlds to you. But we should try better. Science has proven that meditation practice has life-altering benefits for anyone willing to stick to it. Everyone should have access to these benefits.
So I want to get very sober about meditation and discuss these profound benefits in a way that anyone can understand, providing a way in for skeptics and beginner meditators.
Don’t believe I can do it? Read on and let me convince you otherwise.
- Live Here
Though meditation is a broad field, almost all forms of it build certain core attention skills. And one of them is focus — the ability to pay attention to what’s happening right here, right now.
Meditation has made me realise, and continue to realise, just how little I live in the present. A lot of the time, I’m operating at 10% capacity. I don’t really taste, feel, see, breathe, or touch. I’m here, but I’m somewhere else.
This non-presence makes us look elsewhere for happiness. It’s always later on that we’ll be happy. It’s after work, or tomorrow, or at the weekend, or next month, or next year. Never now.
How about if you really lived right here, right now, getting five times more out of every moment?
2. Boredom
Boredom is closely related to the theme of presence. Put plainly, we have low tolerance for low stimulation.
If there’s no music to entertain us, we feel empty. If we’re not in a drunken daze, we feel bored. And God forbid we can’t whip out our mobile to fill the hole when there’s nothing else going on.
Top-level scientific studies show that meditation increases several attention skills, including the attentional blink. This makes sense — we constantly bring our attention back to the present.
All this means meditation makes you more boredom-tolerant. No more mindless phone scrolling.
In fact, I actually look forward to my empty moments now. I pay attention to things I’m usually apt to ignore. I sit and feel my body. I watch the play of the mind. I am where I am with no need to add anything to it.
3. Free From Mental World
Regular meditation slowly but surely frees you from the tyranny of the mind. The consequences of this are huge and deepen with time, but let me touch on the very practical implications of this.
Put bluntly, your mind labels, interprets and distorts everything in your life — people, situations, what you see, what you hear, what you feel. The effects of this are innumerable. In fact, you could even say that we don’t know what life is like without the distorting mind.
This process makes you react in well-worn, predictable ways. It has you suffer. It has you live in the head, as though lodged behind the eyes somewhere, forgetting the body. And it distorts the only access to life we have: our direct experience of it.
Meditation frees you from this. You literally deconstruct the mind. Not physically, like you would dismantle a bike, but with your attention. You see this going on with the eyes of focus.
4. Go Beyond Yourself
Okay, this is starting to sound a little far out, I’ll admit. But let me bring even the concept of self-transcendence down to the earth.
If you begin to carefully observe your mind, not only will you see its craziness, you’ll realise that most of its content is self-referential. You spend most of your life immersed a never-ending film in which you play the protagonist.
This means you take life personally: your ups, your downs, your joy, your pain, and everything in between. It’s likely you can’t even imagine otherwise.
With meditation, we start to see that this identity is really a fiction, and begin to move beyond it into deeper sense of self.
And it might seem that living life as this self is a positive. But the cost is much greater than the reward. And once you see its flimsiness and ethereality, you’ll never want to go back.
Master the essentials of meditation with my Mindfulness Meditation for Beginners Online Course.
