The effects of a regular meditation practice
For many of us, multiple layers of stress and fatigue have been accumulating in our central nervous system (CNS) for years, due to the demands that life presents upon us and the stressful environment in which we live nowadays. Many people go through life with their innate defense mechanisms switched on 24x7.
Meditation causes those defense mechanisms to switch off and our body and mind to fall into a deep resting state allowing our CNS to spontaneously shed the layers of stress and conditionings, and to deeply recover from the effects of accumulated stress and fatigue.
Our awareness also expands, deepening our relationship with ourselves. We become more capable of witnessing the sensations, emotions and thoughts that we experience and address them on the spot.
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More Benefits
In a recent book called Brain Wash, Dr. David Perlmutter (a renowned integrative neurologist) explains how our modern life habits (e.g. the food we eat, technology, social media, the way we shop, etc.) push us to develop the ancient part of our brain that makes us more impulsive, irrational, irritable and addicted to immediate gratification (the limbic brain). He proposes that these habits also put us in a state of primal fear (defense mechanism) and we lose our sense of connection with others and everything that surrounds us. Dr. Perlmutter calls the latter, a disconnection syndrome.
This fascinating book contains an entire chapter dedicated to meditation and the ways that it can reduce the negative effects of our modern life habits, including the disconnection syndrome. The author highlights that “because meditation reinforces areas of the brain that helps us stay focussed and present, it helps reprogram our brains for wellbeing, empathy and gratitude”.*
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