Meditation Helps You Grow Inside and Out
Peace, tranquility and openness are all things people associate with meditation. The fundamental modus operandi of meditation is that it brings us closer to the very core of ourselves – the root of the human condition – and that is suffering.
There is no human on Earth who has lived a life free of suffering. This is so universal that Buddha virtually crafted it into a definition of existence, “life is suffering."
Notice, however, that people who meditate don’t walk around miserable all the time. The reason is that by bringing yourself deeper into the pain that is the inevitable core of life, you develop a tolerance to it. This doesn’t mean that people who meditate experience less pain – if anything they experience it more because they make sure they never escape it – but they are able to maintain a healthy detachment from it; i.e. the travails of life impinge less on their being.
A good physical analogy is that when one experiences a sprain of any kind, it can often be useful to move into the pain (through message or gentle exercise) to help relieve it.
It is through this analogy with developing resistance to and relief from physical pain that scientific exploration of these concepts has become recently possible. Just this week a paper was published in the American Psychological Association Journal, Emotion, regarding a study conducted by researchers in Montreal Canada. Joshua Grant, the lead researcher, described the way in which they measured the brain thickness of 17 Zen meditators and 18 non-meditators using MRI scans. They examined in particular specific areas of the brain that regulate emotion and pain and what they discovered was that these areas are significantly thicker in meditators than non meditators.
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