If you spend any time on my site, you’ll quickly note that I’m a meditation lover and advocate. My online meditation offerings are an integral part of my approach to health and wellness. I often have to restrain my enthusiasm because coming off as a proselytizer isn’t very effective, but I’m often left scratching my head and wondering: “why do so many people think meditation is not for them?”
Of course, there are religious or metaphysical associations with many forms of meditation, like opening chakras, purifying karma, or attaining enlightenment. Then there’s the assumption that meditation means sitting still, stopping thoughts, and turbo-charged introspection.
Most insidiously, in my experience as a practitioner and teacher, is that many people think that meditation is about uncovering personality faults, changing oneself, and becoming a better person. I think we should all strive to be the healthiest version of ourselves, but if we’re not careful, the very things that could help us feel happier, healthier, and more engaged in our lives instead reinforce a negative view of ourselves. Motivating ourselves by reminding ourselves of our faults simply doesn’t work, which is a big reason efforts to meditate often fail (also 80% of New Years resolutions… by February).
What often gets glossed over in reasons to meditate is the profound health benefits that come from re-tuning your physiological system by staying embodied in the present moment. Alan Fogel, psychologist, massage therapist, and author of Body Sense, defines embodied self-awareness as (emphasis mine) “the ability to pay attention to ourselves, to feel our sensations, emotions, and movements on-line, in the present moment, without the mediating influence of judgmental thoughts.” Sensing your immediate embodied experience is also called interoception and there has been a lot of fascinating research coming out on the subject in the past 10 years. Back in 1999, Donald Bakal called somatic awareness (his term for what we’re talking about) the “cutting edge” of integrative healthcare. Well, it still is.
Brace yourself for a quick crash course on (one aspect) of how the brain and body work together.
Our neurological system is organized into efferent (going away from the brain) and afferent (coming to the brain) pathways. Afferent pathways bring sensory data to the brain from internal (such as blood chemistry or fatigue) or external (such as sights, temperature, or sounds) sources. Various regions of the brain organize and process this information then utilize efferent pathways to cue muscle movements, hormone secretion, or raising heart or respiration rates to respond to those changes inside and outside the body. Some information gets sent to the priority inbox, run up the flagpole, and brought to our conscious attention like hunger, thirst, or extreme cold so we can do something about it. Most, however, is processed without our conscious involvement as our body maintains homeostasis - a general term for maintaining a dynamic equilibrium in a constantly changing internal and external environment.
The bundles of nerves that bring information from internal sources transfer information more slowly than the nerves that come from external sources, presumably because we need to know more quickly about the car speeding towards the crosswalk than if we’re starting to get hungry. The problem is that because that internally-oriented information moves more slowly, it tends to get overwhelmed or ignored, either because we live in a time of information overload or because over time we stopped paying attention to our embodied experience. Maybe we never learned how or maybe because there’s an anger/guilt/sadness gremlin lurking in our chest waiting to derail any attempt we make to be present in our bodies.
That’s a lot, and there’s more that could be said, but the upshot is that meditation is not about bringing everything inside you to the level of your conscious conceptual involvement. That would be insane and completely unnecessary. I don’t want to know precisely the level of serotonin in my blood right now. But since I feel relatively content, I assume it must be okay. My stomach, however, is telling me to go eat something. Soon… I have to finish these edits!
Science is showing that the practice of meditation strengthens our body-brain’s innate capacity to sense, understand, and respond to real-time information. Even without our awareness and conscious involvement, practices like meditation that develop embodied self-awareness make your brain-body healthier and more resilient.
However, strengthening the neurological loops through meditation brings some things to our awareness, including emotions that may be hijacking our innate healthy response. That anger/guilt/sadness gremlin? Even if you don’t acknowledge it (or you consistently act it out hoping to get rid of it), it’s still acting behind the scenes to tense your muscles, affect your brain chemistry, disrupt your sleep, impair your digestion, or a myriad of other possible effects at the root of dysfunction and chronic illness. By basing our meditation practice in the embodied present and progressively exploring our felt experience, emotional triggers, and responses, we can resist overwhelm or suppression, develop new strategies for dealing with whatever triggers us, and make healthier choices.
These conscious and unconscious benefits will happen with regular practice, just like going jogging will strengthen your body. But, just like your feet will hurt if you run in the wrong shoes, how you practice meditation is important. The posture you take, the attitude you bring, and the support you have all matter a great deal.
The truth is that meditation is good for us, but we shouldn’t do it because we feel there is something wrong with us. Instead of a self-improvement ritual based in feeling bad about ourselves, meditation can be a ritual of friendliness, feeling alive, and feeding the innate strength of our body-brain.
If you would like more on meditation, start my 4-part series on the nuts and bolts of a meditation practice. You can also visit the meditation home page to see if any of my current guided meditation offerings work for you.