At the Washington National Cathedral’s spirituality conference this past weekend, Sharon Salzberg noted that medical science has been studying the neurophysiologic benefits of meditation with MRIs and brain wave studies. As one of the foremost meditation teachers in the United States, she fretted that they’d put her in one of those machines and find the wrong parts of her brain activated. She got a good laugh at that.
With alpha, theta and beta wave increases, science documents what the ancients observed for centuries: People who meditate enjoy calm and focus as well as improved creativity and increased ability to vividly imagine.
Meditation frees the mind from turbulent desires, emotions and thoughts. The mental muscles that contort, strain, tense as they judge, rationalize and defend all relax. A time set apart to meditate also can bring unconscious thoughts into conscious awareness.
Salzberg stresses that if you learn nothing else from a meditation practice, you learn that you can begin again.
In meditation, you begin again all the time, and in doing so, you experience renewal that permeates your life.
For me, that sense of renewal is the best reason to meditate.
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