Why Meditate?

When it comes to building a balanced, healthy life, meditation is the most powerful tool in our kit. Quieting the mind and deeply resting the body through a short, daily practice allows stress and fatigue to get released, awareness to expand, and happiness to increase.

When stress is dissolved in the body more quickly than it can accumulate, our entire nervous system can function at its optimum level. Our organs and systems function normally, our healing faculties work energetically, and disease and chronic pain have a harder time taking hold. Our rate of aging is slowed down considerably so that we look and feel younger. And with less stress cluttering up the system, our five senses begin to function at finer, subtler levels: we begin to notice more of each moment and the fast pace of life slows down.

When mental chatter and noise are wiped from the mind each day, we gain clarity, lucidity, and calmness of thought. Anxiety is reduced; memory, creativity, and learning ability is enhanced, and we can fit more things into our awareness without feeling cramped. Meditating is like turning down the volume, only to discover there’s extra bandwidth available for use.

The equation is: do less, achieve more. By putting activity on hold for just twenty minutes, and resting profoundly, we fill up our fuel tanks of energy and adaptability. By making contact with the quiet reserves of serenity, strength, and joy that exist deep within ourselves, we experience equanimity no matter what storms are blowing on the surface. By waking up more of our awareness and our innate potential to act, meditation enables us to be the kind of conscious and compassionate citizens that the world needs now.