Meditation: Alters your Brain

Meditation has had both good and bad connotations over the years. Some people think it is plainly a waste of time. But there is a severe disconnect with what people think meditation is.

My earliest experiences with meditation was with my father. He was a practitioner of meditation, but he would never define what he did in terms of meditation.

He taught me to hunt by quietly sitting in the woods and letting the animals come to you. Fishing was much the same process. We would sit still while we fished, and without thinking our world's troubles we would be consumed by how our senses became attuned to the real world around us.

I have found that people associate meditation with Buddhism. And with the limited knowledge of the Buddhist steps of enlightenment, people understand Nirvana as reaching the end point of nothingness.

Well, we can thank our language barrier for presenting us with another mistranslation. How I understand Nirvana is "no one thing." But there are others that would argue, that "nirvāna can only be approximated by what it is not." But in a simplistic sense, my definition works for me.

Meditation has spanned many cultures and in many forms. How to define meditation itself is not that easy.

Here is an interesting caveat though, meditation has been found to alter the human brain.

This from Science News Den Daily:

"Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in
adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and
well-being," says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard
Medical School.

To me, this is not surprising at all. Meditation has been part of my life for years, but how I define what I do may be very different than what you would suspect. If I were to give you simple instructions on meditation, I would just say find a quiet place to sit and use your senses to join the world that is happening around you. And there are other techniques that are all worth exploring, and trying. And soon you might find yourself discovering its value in every part of your life.