Meditation had always been a research area in the spiritual realm , and until the 1990s there was no comprehensive scientific research on this topic. A relevant event occurred in 1991, when scientists Francisco Varela and Adam Engle, together with the Dalai Lama, created the Mind and Life Institute in the United States with the aim of exploring the interface between science and meditation. Another relevant event was in the late 90s, when neurologist Marcus Raichle incorporated techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging to the investigation of the default neural network. From there there has been a progressive rapprochement between science and tradition. The scientific community has become aware of the detailed analysis of the mind that the meditative traditions have been doing for centuries and has placed meditation as one more focus of their research . Currently, the scientific community in this field, led among others by Richard Davidson, is finding enormous similarities about the practical results of meditation between his advances in neuroscience and what was written in ancient texts such as the Satipatthana Sutta. What is the Meditation Process? The meditation process is something simple to understand and, instead, more difficult to do . It's like making a "hole in 1" in golf, the instruction is to get the ball into the hole with a single stroke. It's easy to understand right? But not so easy to do and even less to do at will with each stroke. The first thing you learn when you start is the set of meditation techniques; Perhaps the best known are those of focused attention, based on attending to an object in the present constantly and, when the attention leaves and you realize it, you come back again. But if one progresses properly, one realizes that meditation is more than just bringing the mind to the object each time it becomes distracted . Meditation practice allows you to be in this world with a greater feeling of happiness, fluidity, presence, and clarity. In my experience as a Adelaide Naturopath I can say that the progression in learning is not linear , there are weeks in which a People progresses a lot and others that seem to go backwards. This is normal, since it is a very subjective experience and depends a lot on the emotional state of the student. What are the benefits of meditation?The benefit of meditation can be divided into four main areas , positive aspects that are obtained thanks to brain neuroplasticity . They are as follows. 1. The Attention Process By increasing the capacity for sustained attention, meditation allows us to improve focus and concentration . 2. Body AwarenessDecreasing the tendency to judge internal experience helps us understand external experience and gives us a greater capacity to make decisions . 3. Emotional Regulation Experiencing what is present in the field of consciousness, observing these experiences without altering or reacting to them, allows us to attend to unpleasant emotions or sensations from an attitude that generates habituation, acceptance and greater capacity to sustain difficult emotions and regulate them. 4. Changes in the Perspective of the Self Observing without judgment and being equanimous, it allows the disidentification of the contents by the conscience ; this fact happens when experiencing the changing and improper nature of reality. The fact of experiencing oneself as something not separate from the rest changes the process of self-perception and facilitates the change.
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