Meditation is the art of silencing the mind, allowing concentration to increase and inner peace to emerge in the midst of a world full of turmoil. 

To understand how this constant turmoil can negatively affect your mind, you need to look at your mind like a lake.  

When someone throws a rock into the lake, or a boat passes through it, ripples and waves are created, rising until they reach the shore and disappear. Now imagine your thoughts are the waves inside your mind. 

Just like throwing something in the lake will create ripples and waves, being regularly exposed to the negative thoughts and overthinking what happened in the past or the future, will distort your mind’s calmness and leave you feeling anxious, tense, worried and stressed.

Unfortunately, in a desperate attempt to conquer these negative thoughts and restore calmness to our lives, we end up allowing our thoughts to control our mind instead. 

When you find yourself plagued by negative thoughts, anxiety, or worry, it is important to remember, that like the ripples in the lake, those in your mind will rise and fall in intensity. 

Instead of judging your thoughts and trying to stop your mind’s chatter, you need to allow your thoughts to come and go, watching them float away. One way to do this is through meditation.

Meditation is nothing more than a method for calming the mind. It can be a clear pathway to self-discovery, as well as a restorative and healing process for the mind, body, and soul. 

While there are many different kinds of meditation, they all share universal benefits. Here are five compelling reasons why you should start meditating and cultivating it as a daily habit.

Gain Inner Peace

Just like your house, your mind needs to be cleaned. Every day, we fill our minds with negative thoughts, emotions, energy, and a ton of junk that piles up, filling our body, heart, mind, and soul. 

These negative thoughts can come from many different sources; the media, interactions with other people throughout our day, the environment, our job, and even from within ourselves. 

If you don’t participate in regular meditation, this negative junk accumulates inside of you over time. You end up becoming a living trash container filled with negative thoughts and emotions. 

During regular meditation practice, you clear all of this junk out of your system, just like you do when cleaning your house. You get rid of the negativity and return that energy back to the earth to be converted into positive energy. After a single session of meditation, you are no longer bogged down by the turmoil in your life. 

If you haven’t been meditating on a regular basis, it will take time to remove the negativity. After several weeks of consistently practicing meditation, you will find that you’ve reached an absolute calmness in your mind. This calmness in your mind will lead to an increased level of self-awareness. 

Increase Your Self-Awareness

Every day, you have approximately 60,000 thoughts running through your mind. With this many thoughts running through your mind on a daily basis, it can be hard to know what you are thinking all the time. 

You may experience a constant inability to understand what you are thinking of or what you want. Meditation gives you the clarity to know what you are thinking and provides you with the ability to recognize your inner desires. Meditation brings you an increased self-awareness.

The thoughts in your mind include those that you are actively engaged in, as well as those that you aren’t conscious of, but are always there. 

For those that don’t meditate on a regular basis, they are only able to pick up on a few of the thousands of thoughts that run through their mind in an hour. Those who meditate regularly can pick up on even more.

The more you practice meditation, the more self-aware you become. It allows you to become more conscious of what you think, the way you think, what you want, and what you feel. This kind of clarity is essential regarding your decisionmaking process and in your life. 

Without the sort of clarity and self-awareness, you gain from meditation, you can become easily swayed by the external factors that surround you.

Become More Grounded and Calmer

As you begin your meditation practice, you become more unattached to the physical world, and you start to observe your own reality like a third-party observer. 

You begin to observe the kinds of feelings and thoughts that run through you. You begin to observe how people act around you, and to the things in your environment. Meditation allows you to stop being ruled by your ego, and instead, you become more aligned with your higher self.

This kind of detachment allows you to become more grounded, calmer, and level-headed. The chasm between the stimulus and your response to the stimulus grows wider. With meditation, you can find the time to observe, process, and assess everything that is happening around you.

In the past, there might have been events that resulted in consciousness lowering behavior, where you automatically reacted like you always do out of your typical persona. 

Practicing meditation will enable you to, moving forward, better deal with these events, without having your consciousness lowered. It allows you to handle them more objectively and in a more detached manner without having to worry about your ego interfering.

Cures Insomnia 

Sleep disturbances, like having a hard time falling asleep or staying asleep affects millions of Americans daily. 

The daytime sleepiness that follows can leave you feeling unproductive and lousy and may even harm your health. A recent study has revealed that participating in mindfulness meditation, a mind-calming practice that focuses on breathing and awareness can help.

One of the main reasons why people suffer from insomnia is because of the bombardments of thoughts in their minds. This can result in dealing with constant stress, anxiety, and depression. 

Regular meditation helps to clear out this clutter, allowing you to slip more easily into sleep and helps you to stay asleep through the night as well. 

In addition to helping ease you more easily into sleep, meditation helps to improve the quality of sleep that you experience. When you are asleep, your mind is sorting through all the mental clutter that you’ve accumulated throughout the day. 

Taking the time to meditate before you go to sleep helps to remove this clutter and set your mind at ease for a more peaceful rest.

Engaging in mindfulness meditation before going to sleep will help you in consciously resolving emotional issues that happen throughout the day, allowing your subconscious mind to become restful and alleviates the need for it to wake you up during the night. 

The end result is longer and more restful sleep, allowing you to wake up energized and refreshed.

A Great Source of Inspiration

A majority of us are probably only utilizing about one percent of our brain. Our physical selves and our ego are what controls this one percent. That means that the remaining 99 percent of our intelligence lives in our subconscious mind. 

It is this 99 percent where our most powerful ideas lie. This is the part of the brain where we get our inspiration, our best solutions to problems, and our greatest ideas. 

The power of the subconscious mind is what many great leaders used in their daily lives to find the clarity and insight needed to succeed.

Those who work in jobs that require a significant amount of creativity, such as musicians and artists, have either learned how to access their subconscious mind or are naturally able to do it.

Meditation allows us to tap into that 99 percent, which is usually shut out from our physical lives. 

Being able to tap into the 99 percent is like a secret pass that allows us to gain instant, new ideas, and solutions that we couldn’t have generated with our conscious mind. 

If you are looking for new ideas for something you are working on or are trying to work through a frustrating problem that you can’t seem to solve, try meditating on it and see what you get. 

Through constant practice, you will be able to strengthen the connection you have with your subconscious mind. After a time, you will find the solutions that have been generated by your subconscious mind are often more insightful and better than those that your conscious mind has created.

Conclusion

Overall, the different benefits that can be gained by regular meditation will combine to give you a more fulfilling life.

Meditation allows you to gain increased mastery of yourself, to enable you to become more positive and rejuvenated. 

With regular practice, meditation places you in the position of getting even more out of your life every day. 

Getting started on the path to a happier and healthier life through meditation doesn’t take a lot of work, just the motivation and dedication to fitting in regular practice. 

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