Meditating Daily

[Ouroboros]

Who here meditates every day? How long do you meditate for?

Just this week I've made an actual effort to meditate every day...twenty minutes or more if I have time, but I shoot for at least 10 to 15 minutes. Until I actually started doing it, I didn't realize just how much time even 15 minutes really is.

For those experienced in meditation, when you first started your practice how long was it before you saw noticeable differences/effects from it?

[Tom]

Sometimes it just makes me really irritable. When you look for results, don't just look for changes that seem positive.

[Ouroboros]

Sometimes it just makes me really irritable. When you look for results, don't just look for changes that seem positive.

Are you speaking in the context of specific sessions? I'm more looking for people's experiences with long-term effects...for instance, do the people here who meditate daily feel they are more relaxed, centered, and generally more content than they feel they would be without meditation? And if so, how long into their practice was it before they started noticing these effects?

I've read that according to studies most people see beneficial results of daily meditation after a few weeks...I'm just looking to see if that's consistent with the experiences of AD members. :)

[Tom]

If you want to know about a specific type of meditation, that would help. Even a general category. Sometimes meditation is to stir things up so it can get resolved and sometimes meditation smoothes things over.

[Ouroboros]

Ah, good point. I suppose then my question focuses mainly on mindfulness meditation. For example, the meditation method I'm trying out first is following the breath. In keeping with what I've been reading both in books and here, I've tried not to have any goals for my sessions other than to simply follow my breath.

[amazingjourney]

I do charka work twice every day, and also meditate afterwards, usually 30 minutes each session.

Meditation is something that's very special to me. I was once in a personal crisis. Probably the ego death, total surrender and willingness, created this void in me. I literally felt a pulling power from within. I walk around feeling this pull for about two months, knowing that I was supposed to sit down and meditate to connect with it.

So I did. Right away, I had very strong experience. The first few days, I sat 25 minutes, didn't even look at the time. Then I sat longer and longer each day, quickly I found myself stitting an hour in most sessions, twice a day.

Things just kept unfolding to me during sitting. Something seems to center me, pulling me within, until I get to this immense stillness. Every session was just like nothing I have ever known.

About two weeks into the intense practice, one day all of a sudden, I asked myself " Why am I so happy?" I have seemed to gone through a transformation inside and out! I made a list of things that I have noticed. I knew I was not the same.

So I was in this bliss and awe for two years. Then it gradually fade into the background, due to lack of guidance to move further and no one to talk to about these.

I picked up the practice again May 2008, and since then I have gradually picking up the speed and the energy has developed once again. But comparing to my original experience, if it was 95%, currently it is around 70%. This time around, I have taken on too much work load at work and the stress does not help.

The meditation I practice is power of now. I would say that is the most profound thing to do.

[amazingjourney]

This is when I surf on the web and find the benefits of meditation from various studies:

Brain images show that there is a decreased activity in the parietal lobe. This area of the brain is responsible for giving us a sense of our orientation in space and time. Blocking all sensory and cognitive input into this area during meditation results in the sense of no space and no time. (This is why we feel there is no space and time during meditation.)

A study found that people who had been meditating for more than five years were physiologically 12 to 15 years younger than non-meditators.

Meditation decreases oxygen consumption, heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure, and increase the intensity of alpha, theta, and delta brain waves--the opposite of the physiological changes that occur during stress.

Improved mental abilities: Increased intelligence, increased creativity, improved learning ability, improved memory, improved reaction time, higher levels of moral reasoning, improved academic achievement, greater orderliness of brain functioning, increased self-actualization.

Improved Health: Reduced stress and anxiety, reduced hospitalization, reduced incidence of disease, reduced need for out-patient medical care, reduced health care costs, reduce use of alcohol and drugs, improved cardiovascular health, reduced physical complaints, increased longevity

Improved social behavior: improved self-confidence, reduced anxiety, improved family life, improved relationships at home and at work, increased tolerance, improved job performance, increased job satisfaction

Meditation found to increase brain size---Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.The increased thickness of gray matter is not very much, 4 to 8 thousandths of an inch. "These increases are proportional to the time a person has been meditating during their lives," Lazar notes. "This suggests that the thickness differences are acquired through extensive practice and not simply due to differences between meditators and nonmeditators

Meditation build up the brain

Meditation may bolster brain activity ---Buddhist monks who spent years in meditation training show significantly greater brain activity in areas associated with learning and happiness than those who have never practiced meditation. They had a higher level of this sort of gamma wave activity before they began meditation and this difference increased dramatically during meditation. The extremely high levels of gamma wave activity are the highest ever reported.

Buddhists really are happier.

Meditation balance the body's system ---Meditation produces long-lasting changes in the brain activity in areas involved in attention, working memory, learning, and conscious perception

Research on stress and meditation

Meditator's brain shows a pronounced shift toward the left frontal lobe. People who are habitually calm an happy typical show greater activity in this area.

Meditator has higher levels of certain immune cells.

Meditation is involved in the global coordination of brain activity and could induce both short-term and long-term change in the brain.

Long term meditation practice changes the baseline state of the brain.

Meditation is shown to reduce risk factors for heart disease such as high blood pressure, stress and smoking. Comparing with other techniques, the Transcendental meditation group had a 23% decrease in deaths from all causes, a 30% reduction in cardiovascular disease deaths, and a 49% reduction in the rate of death from cancer

During meditation, the monks in the study was able to raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by 17 degrees, three monks could lower their metabolism by 64%

Meditators over 6-9 months showed a marked decrease in the thickness of their artery walls.

[Alaskans]

Good job on the research amazingjourney. And thats just the effects medical science could record.
My advice is start out meditating for 10-15 and push yourself to meditate a little longer than you want to every day, building up your med time.

It's good to do sitting meditation because the ritual of sitting will eventually automatically place you in a meditative state. You'll begin to notice time less, and once you get to an hour you wont want to get up.