Meditation: Balance, Foundations: Day 3 Length: 5 minutes Where: Bedroom, Los Angeles How It Felt: Needed
This meditation was cool! There was a little tutorial before it started with a few slides about what meditation does for the brain. I was given a choice to learn more, which I did, and I was given details about the science behind the brain/meditation relationship.
I love that!
Basically, consistent meditation actually changes your brain. That’s the reason it changes your life. What I learned is the following:
- Meditation changes the density of grey matter in areas tied to attention control, emotion regulation, and self-awareness.
- Meditation improves the brain’s working-memory capacity, attention span, and can even improve academic performance.
- Meditation can shield the brain from stress, which is amazing. Studies show meditation improves how and when the Salience Network is activated, which is an actual network in our brains that coordinates the stress response, among other things.
Basically, meditation is awesome.
It’s always hard to remember how different life felt before you started doing something you’ve done for a long time. Still, I know for a fact consistent meditation over the past ten months has changed me completely. I used to get angry at so many things. Stress could shut me down quickly. I got overwhelmed often, and I wasn’t nearly as quick to understand why I was feeling the way I was feeling.
Now, I actually feel in control of my thoughts, emotions, and reactions. It’s amazing. It’s not that I don’t still get angry or sad or hurt or whatever it may be, but I really feel like I can now sit back (after the initial onset) and actually observe those feelings, analyze them, and understand what they are trying to tell me, instead of giving over to them.
In a year that has been stressful, ever-changing, totally unpredictable, and full of real life heartbreak and challenges, like losing loved ones, it’s hard to measure against past “normal” years. If anything, though, I should be more of a mess, and I feel like less of one.
So, in conclusion, meditation FTW!
My Year of Meditation 