Expert: Judy - 7/19/2010

Question
What exactly is meditation and what does it benefit?

Thank you!

Answer
A lot of time, and most people, meditation is mistakenly viewed as a technique or narrowed to the seating meditation.  Seating meditation is just one form of meditation.  A lot of people start their meditation with seating meditation, because it is the easiest way to center themselves.  However, meditation is a way of life.  Meditation is mindfulness and awareness.  anyone who has seating meditation experience should broaden their meditation.  Actually, anything you do can be a meditation such as eating, listening to someone singing, reading, and etc....

Meditation is NOT concentration.  When we concentrate, we only focus on one single sense.  If someone can thinks so hard with his mind while cooking, he could cook his watch.  LOL, that's called concentration, but not meditation or awareness at all.  Meditation is centered on your breaths, while all the senses are activating.  A meditator becomes an observer; he watches himself as if he was watching a film of himself.  He watches what he hears, smells, tastes, touches, sees, and what the thoughts rise in his mind, without any effort.

Everyone of us possesses the gift to be aware, yet most of us have gotten unfamiliar with it for a long time that we tend not to have the skill at all (people who have never meditated).  Then, it requires practices to regain the skill back.


Since there are so many benefits from meditations in different aspects, I am afraid that from my own words I cannot include everything.  I would refer to these web pages:

http://www.healthandyoga.com/html/meditation/objectives.html

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200304/the-benefits-meditation

http://www.benefitsofmeditation.org/