Meditation: Health and Spirituality

The aim of meditation, the scientists discovered long after Eastern mystics had been practicing it for centuries, is to get alpha waves of about 9Hz to predominate in the brain instead of the everyday life beta waves of 20+Hz. This results in a reduction in stress and anxiety levels, which are probably at an all- time high in the populations of the developed world, in those who practice it.

You can choose from a number of types of meditation, varying in price when it comes to teachers and teaching methods, or you can DIY with meditation CDs, the internet and books.

• ‘Mantra meditation’ was given to the western world and the Beatles in the 1960s with TM, Transcendental meditation.
• Other mantra types include NSR, Natural Stress Relief techniques,
• And Primordial Sound Meditation, from Dr Deepak Chopra.
• Buddhists favour Pranayama, a practice with breathing and counting, not a mantra.
• Mindfulness, one of the most recent introductions and highly thought of in Mental Health circles. It has its’ own website, www.mindful.org , and is accessible through books and the internet, free on Youtube.
• ‘Guided meditations’ and visualisations are also available on Youtube and CDs are available for different slants on Personal Development and spirituality.

Before the buzz word of ‘Meditation’, religions had their own approach to mental prayer, sometimes dubbed ‘Contemplation’. The Greek philosopher Plato reckoned that contemplation would give the contemplative access to the
highest form; Jewish thought was that contemplating God involved recognizing moral perfection; Mohammed went up Mt Hira to contemplate Life and its’ meaning; the 14 th century Christian treatise ‘The cloud of unknowing’ said that contemplation was a ‘kind of transcendent seeing’, without use of the intellect….’God can be loved, but not thought’

The differences between the two practices become blurred when the brainwaves of 9 Hz are approached. The Contemplative’s direct awareness of the Divine and the Meditator’s clearance of thoughts from the mind both have the possibility of connecting with the Divine.

This is why Spiritualists meditate.