Meditation for you and me

Traditional healers and yogis have always believed in the power of meditation and breathing techniques in healing. The use of meditation for healing is not new. It has been rooted in the traditions of the world's great religions. In fact, practically all-religious groups practice meditation in one form or another. The value of meditation to reduce suffering and promote healing has been known and practiced for thousands of years. Lately many medical practioners have advocated this treatment as a way to lower blood pressure, help people with asthma breathe easier, relieve insomnia and generally help relax the everyday stress and strain of life. Meditation was found to be the best way to balance a person's physical, emotional, and mental states.

The word meditation albeit brings to us pictures of people performing a set of arduous postures. However as feared meditation is not a difficult practice that requires chanting or sitting in the lotus position. For people like you and me involved in our day-to-day lives, who are seeking more serenity and calmness in our lives some amount of meditation will be most beneficial.

Here are some easy tips which all of us could follow:

1. Sit in a comfortable position, cross -legged or if uncomfortable you could sit on a straight-backed chair or lie on your back.
2. Straighten your spine.
3. Just try and be a witness to your breath.
4. Watch the breath as it enters your nostrils, watch it as it leaves your nostrils. Just concentrate on the passage of breath through your nostrils i.e. the triangular portion that constitutes of the nose.
5. In the initial stages of the practice you might find it difficult to track your breath, this being the case, consciously breathe in and breathe out deeply for some time, until you gain focus and then let the breath settle down to it's normal natural rhythm.
6. Your mind may wander during the process; thoughts constituting of past events or the future may arise in the mind, if thoughts come of their own naturally don't suppress them, neither indulge in them, just be a witness, the secret is to just return to your breath awareness, the moment you realize, are aware that the mind has wandered.
7. Continue for 10 minutes to an hour.

There are other meditation techniques, which constitute of chanting mantras, (the mind totally absorbed in the intonation and meaning of the mantra) or concentrating on the form of some deity (the mind absorbed in the qualities and the form of the chosen deity) or concentrating on specific energy centers within the body.

All these techniques have been found to be equally effective and are different paths that are ultimately trying to achieve the same objective (to focus and concentrate the mind at one point by cutting of all external stimuli, so that the mind slowly dives within itself revealing it's own nature. This is when the magic happens.)

But the above mentioned breath meditation is the most recommended as it is the most natural easy to practice and appealing to one and all cutting across religions and races.

Eighty percent of health problems are related to stress. These problems can not be adequately addressed by medications and surgeries, but respond very well to mind body approaches like meditation. The relaxation responses could be characterized as tension leaving the muscles, decrease in anxiety, and reduction in stress hormones. We may wonder how sitting still can have this kind of power. Meditation affects the brain activity specifically the part that controls metabolism, blood pressure, respiration and heart rate.

Today our world is fast, demanding and exciting. These produce stress, emotional reactions, anxiety, worry and anticipation. Our bodies and minds initially tolerate these but after a while, we reach a point of saturation and the result becomes unbearable, even unendurable.

No medications available can eliminate these problems without triggering some side effect or the other within us. There are tranquilizers and stress relieving drugs available in the market, which might give us a feeling of temporary relief, but end up causing more harm by getting us addicted to these drugs and long term use ends up triggering side effects within the body. To manage these universal concerns we must learn to go inside ourselves, right at the root of the problem. Among the steps we can take is the learning and practicing of meditation. We need to understand that the true powers of meditation can manifest if we learn to imbibe the two basic principles of meditation-to relax and to be aware as part of our lives.