Q: I see the value of meditation. But what I’d like to know is what’s actually happening. How is meditation able to change us, physically, mentally, spiritually? What’s going on?
The autonomic system is being told that it’s okay to relax. Breathing slows, the heartbeat slows, thinking slows. Brain activity moves into quieter patterns. The body expends less energy on stress responses. Healing speeds up, because there’s less interference.
The emotions are told that it’s alright to stop being on red-alert. It’s alright to let feelings take care of themselves for a few moments. One can choose to focus on the emotions if the desire is to work through them. In which case, there is the clarity to understand the emotions without judgment or prejudice. It allows one to feel feelings more purely.
A long-time practitioner of meditation, one who has allowed physiological responses to slow, emotional flare-ups to soothe, and brainwaves to fall into deeper patterns, can begin to use meditation for its true purpose. That purpose is to move awareness through progressively subtler states associated with deeper brainwave patterns.
There is less attachment to the physical body, which allows easier movement through various dimensional states. Many describe these as spiritual or religious experiences, all the way up to enlightenment. There is a purer experience of what is. For a time, the sense of self remains. Eventually, even that falls away, until there is only awareness.
Often meditation happens without extraordinary experiences. Yet healing still occurs. Mental clarity develops. A sense of well-being arises. At other times, movement through deeper states brings great joy, ecstasy, peace, loss of time and place, encounters with other beings, other knowing, and experiences of God-consciousness.
On a mundane level, meditation retrains the mind to be quiet. On a spiritual level, stillness carries awareness into additional states where other experiences unfold. The ultimate experience is enlightenment.
Q: Isn’t this just relaxation? Couldn’t you sit with a glass of wine by the fire and get the same result?
That assumption is inaccurate. Wine does not create the same experience. One of the values of meditation is crystal clarity. Wine does not provide that. Drugs generally do not provide it either, and certainly not in a lasting way.
The deeper experiences happen over sustained practice.
The challenge that many meditators face is the lack of understanding of what meditation is, whether they’re doing it correctly, whether they’re experiencing tangible results. They believe they should have no thoughts, rather than understanding that thoughts will always flow. But meditation shifts awareness elsewhere, into a quiet space beyond the chatter. Thoughts may still exist, but they no longer involve you.
The Western mind is rarely trained in mental discipline from an early age. It is often trained to look for quick results. This often leads to frustration when results are subtle or gradual.
For those who are not sure whether they are reaching deeper states, biofeedback devices can help. These respond to physiological changes associated with relaxation and focus. They create a sound when deeper levels of consciousness are reached. Over time, the sound becomes a reference point. The body learns what deeper states feel like. “When I hear that sound, I know I am in a deeper state. And I know that this is how my body feels in a deeper state.” It can feel incredibly heavy and light at the same time. Incredibly small and infinitely large at the same time. The sound becomes the thread that draws them deeper.
Meditation loosens the habitual grip on physical reality and opens the way toward spiritual awareness.