The Purpose of Meditation

5 Practical Examples You Can Use Today

What is the purpose of meditation? I know when I first started meditating, it can feel really frustrating trying to sit cross-legged on the floor silent and still. You start to wonder what it’s all about.

So I wanted to write a helpful post to give you an idea how you can use meditation in a purposeful way.

The purpose of meditation in its simplest form is to enhance the quality of your life. Meditation helps you achieve this by bringing your mind into the present moment, reducing stress levels in your body and guiding you to the path of spiritual enlightenment. Science has now discovered meditation can decrease the inflammatory chemicals in your body and enhance decision making in your brain.

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Important! Don’t let yourself be suckered into other people’s false believes about meditation.

Like you have to be religious to meditate or it’s only for new age hippies who want to bliss out all day.

Meditation actually has really practical uses that benefit your daily life and can be easily overlooked.

Purposeful Ways You can Use Meditation to Enhance the Quality of Your Life

1.Reduce Stress

“If a person’s basic state of mind is serene and calm, then it is possible for this inner peace to overwhelm a painful physical experience.”
― The Dalai Lama

In today’s’ lighting paced world, our minds can become overwhelmed with never ending emails, smart phones alerts and social media updates.

Stress can seem the norm of our daily life. The problem with stress is it produces a hormone in your body called Cortisol.

Excess Cortisol in your body has been proven to be harmful and have an inflammatory effect.

Chronic stress can lead to a number of serious health problems.

Stress Related Health Problems (List from webmd.com)

Heart Disease
Asthma
Obesity
Diabetes
Headaches
Depression and Anxiety
Gastrointestinal Problems
Alzheimer’s Disease
Accelerated Aging
Premature Death

Mindfulness Meditation has been shown to combat stress by reducing the amount of Cortisol produced by your body.

Researcher’s form Johns Hopkins University found studies that suggested mindfulness meditation can also help psychological stresses like pain, depression and anxiety.

Mindfulness meditation can be focusing your attention on a specific object during meditation. This could be an imagined object, noticing the way you feel, a silently spoken mantra or simply focusing on your breath.

Mindfulness meditation can start to have positive effects after using it consistently for as little as twenty minutes a day.

2.Live in the Present Moment

“Meditation has no purpose, no objective, except to be entirely here and now.” – Alan Watts

Meditation is one of the best ways to bring the mind into the present moment.

Does it really matter to be in the present?

When you live in the present moment you gain more energy because your mind isn’t constantly caught thinking about things you can’t control like the past and the future.

Many people lose much of their attention living in two different time zones.

Reliving events from the past.
Daydreaming about the future.

Why is this important to know?

Meditation helps you recognize these two different time zones and to realize there is a third.

The Present Moment!

When you start to meditate daily you will be able to separate these thoughts more easily and choose to live more in the present.

What does it mean to live in the present moment?

Let me ask you a question:

Have you ever been driving or riding in your car and you get to your destination and suddenly thought “How did I get here?!”

You were so caught up in your thoughts; it was like your mind went on autopilot and drove itself.

Well this is how many people can live their lives.

What are the benefits of being present?

Fully engaged with for friends and family
Make decision with more clarity
Let go of things you can’t control
Really smell the roses and enjoy your surroundings
Becoming grateful for what you have right now
Deal with conflict grounded in the present

The movie I Heart Huckbees have a funny scene about what it’s like to live in the present moment.

Meditation teaches you to bring your mind back to living in this present moment reality. When you start living more of your time in the present, you’ll begin to find more energy throughout your daily life.

3.Improving Sleep

“At the end of the day, I can end up just totally wacky, because I’ve made mountains out of molehills. With meditation, I can keep them as molehills.” – Ringo Starr

Counting fluffy white sheep is now taking a back seat to meditation when it comes to practical sleep solutions.

A clinical trial was conducted with forty nine adults who had trouble sleeping. The trial identified that participants who were taught mindfulness meditation, after six weeks had less fatigue, depression and wait for it ……… insomnia!

So exactly how does it help sleep?

In caveman times our bodies had an amazing alarm system to keep us from danger. When we saw a scary dinosaur our bodies would trigger into a fight or flight response. During this time our bodies increased release of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.

This is like hitting the turbo button on your computer game.

Basically we run fast! And not be dinosaur dinner!

Where the problem lies is in our modern world today. Your flight or flight mechanism can get triggered multiple times a day, many times in non life threatening situations.

When this happens your body doesn’t get the chance to return to its natural relaxed state.

You become constantly alert!

This can also knock your body out of emotional balance, leading to anxiety and an emotional burnout.

Meditation helps to turn off the flight or flight response and assist your bodies return to a natural state of relaxation and rest.

As you meditate over time you be able to turn off this fight or flight response quicker and easier.

This means more snooze time for you!

4.Boost Metal Performance

In today’s tech world we are required to multitask more and more of the time at work and socially.

If you can’t talk on the phone, as you send an email, exercise, drink a coffee, snap a selfie, while walking your dog and flying a kite simultaneously……well!

You just arn’t living!

How do we process all these tasks without mental meltdown?

Mindfulness Meditation has been shown to improve a function of the brain called working memory.

Working Memory is used for simple everyday tasks like remembering a grocery list, a phone number or set of instructions.

But working memory goes a lot deeper than that!

It helps you concentrate on, retain and process, information required to conduct and complete complex tasks.

These include: learning, reasoning and comprehension.

A study was conducted with forty nine volunteers who all were evaluated on wide range of psychological tests:

Mood
Working Memory
Visual Attention
Attention Processing
Concentration

The results showed the group that was trained in meditation practices scored as much as 10x greater on working memory tasks.

In our digital world there is a constant stream of new information daily. We need our working memory to process, comprehend and help us make better decisions.

Mindfulness meditation helps you increase your metal processing power. Which means you’ll begin to become more productive, using less energy.

Testing the Brain

Australian Doctor Graham Phillips decided to put his brain to the test. He wanted to prove if 8 weeks of meditation would have any real effect.

Stage 1 Doctors put his brain through stringent test and scan establish baseline.
Stage 2 Dr Phillips meditated daily for 8 weeks.
Stage 3 Doctors retested to calculate any improvements.

This video shows Dr Phillips receiving his result after the 8 weeks of meditation.

5.Spiritual Enlightenment

“Meditation is listening to the Divine within.” – Edgar Cayce

Some people may believe Spiritual Enlightenment is not as practical as say reducing stress, others may disagree. It’s included here because it’s a fundamental purpose of meditation.

What is Spiritual Enlightenment?

The concept of Spiritual Enlightenment is a very personal and uniquely experienced by each individual that meditates regularly.

It may come as you finding a greater sense of meaning in the world, discovering your true purpose or finding a deeper sense of connection in your life.

It may be simple or be sublime!

You can be assured the experience will be original and uniquely yours.

Do we really need to be enlightened?

Enlightenment doesn’t have to be a massive climatic metamorphosis into the universal white light.

Enlightenment can be small, personal and powerful!

Here’s a question for you.

Have you ever had a massive life event? It could be at work, with family or a relationship. But it pulled the rug from under you and knocked you down hard.

It took everything you had to stand on your feet again.

But you did it!

Once the dust settled and you were standing tall.

Did you have a perspective shift?

See something differently or suddenly understand some small truth about life.

These types of enlightenment can change the way we live our whole lives.

How does meditation help spiritual enlightenment?

Meditation starts to clear a space for your mind to rest and just observe. This quite, silent place of observation allows you to witness and experience without effort.

You don’t need to judge, fix or worry.

You find a peaceful place to quite the mind and observe.

In these moments of stillness and silence, when the mind stops thinking on autopilot, you open a space for something new to appear.

This is where enlightenment can be gently unfolded, revealed and understood fully.

What is the true meaning of meditation?

There are many different types of meditation and yoga techniques that hold their own definition of meditation’s true meaning.

In its simplest form, the true meaning of meditation is to sit and observe.

This can be done by concentrating on an object, observing your thoughts or repeating a mantra.