Top 5 General Health Benefits of Meditation

We’ve all heard about the health benefits of meditation. Scientists have been busily cataloging them for many years now. Each study brings more “proof,” but anyone who meditates experiences the good results right away.

These are the five core health benefits of meditation:

1. Lowers Stress
2. Decreases Anger
3. Increases Happiness
4. Optimizes Allowing of Good Health
5. Strengthens Intuition

Lowers Stress

This is probably the best-documented and most self-explanatory of all the benefits of meditation. Stress harms the body in myriad ways. Meditation, even just a little bit of regular meditation, has been proven time and again to lower stress.

Decreases Anger

Anger is certainly an unpleasant emotion to carry around, and now scientists are starting to really focus on the link between anger and ill-health. Just as stress erodes body systems so does anger. Stress and anger may be different emotions arising from different triggers, but their negative effect on the body is quite similar. AND, their deflation response to meditation is also nearly the same.

Both stress and anger are emotions we must HOLD ON TO to carry them in our emotional systems. So, when we find stillness — even for a brief while — we break that cycle because we let go. At first, the anger and stress return after meditating, but bit by bit they begin to decrease as we learn to let go more and more.

Increases Happiness

Consider a happiness continuum from despair right up through happiness to pure joy. At any given moment in time, we have a happiness “set-point,” a kind of happiness home level. We may go up and down from there, but when we are on an even keel, we return to that same level. Meditation helps to RAISE THAT SET-POINT. The more you meditate, the happier you get overall — your highs are higher and your lows are higher, too!

Living in joy is probably THE most fundamental support for living in good health. Dis-ease cannot get a foothold in a joyful body. Aim for joy!

Allowing Good Health

The natural state of our bodies is good health. Every cell in our bodies strives toward a state of good health every millisecond of every day of our lives. And, our cells know how to be healthy, but we pinch ourselves off from our natural state of good health in many ways.

Quantum physics proves that our thoughts affect material objects and material outcomes. We truly BECOME what we think about. Sometimes the only ways to let go of our negative thoughts (that cause negative outcomes in our bodies) are to meditate or to sleep.

Both sleeping and meditating are equally effective in letting go of negativity and thus ALLOWING GOOD HEALTH. But, the benefit of meditation over sleep is that it is a waking state. We can much more easily translate that letting go from the waking state of meditation to other parts of our waking life than we can from our sleep state.

So, when you learn, through meditation, to let go, you can then learn to let go in everyday, waking activities as well.

Strengthens Intuition

We each are endowed with the most powerful tool to guide us to good health: our intuition. Unfortunately, most of us do not listen to our intuition as much as we could. We miss out on so much information by not listening.

When you meditate, you provide the silence and stillness from which you can start to develop a stronger relationship with you intuition. And, your intuition really can provide you with ALL THE ANSWERS you need to be healthy. The meditation benefit with your intuition is really two-pronged: first, you create an environment in which you can hear your intuition better and then, you become more inclined to listen and act on what your intuition tells you.

SUMMARY

If you are tuned into your intuition, living in a state of joy, allowing your good health and free of anger and stress, you will live your optimal life, including your optimal health. Mediation helps you move toward all these goals.