Be At Peace - Why is Meditation Good for You

"Through meditation you can train your mind to take you to a HAPPY PLACE,"

explains previously Dubai-based expert Alexandra McKenzie.

For 20 years I have travelled the world and studied with spiritual masters and teachers who illuminated my life’s journey.

Along my path I met many people who expressed their desire to meditate, yet struggled with theories and practices of meditation or being unable to calm their thoughts.

Being interested in the human mind, psychology and yoga, I was intrigued by inner transformation through training the mind as one of the concepts of meditation.

I have helped people deal with their challenges and find happiness through various therapies and methods.

To be truly happy, we must do two things: change our limiting beliefs and meditate.

As I work with clients using cognitive therapies to change their limiting beliefs, I clearly see most problems could be easily prevented, understood and conquered with one simple technique – meditation. Meditation transforms the mind and we can all do this.

We are consumed from morning to night by endless activity. We do not have much time or energy to engage in finding basic causes for our happiness or suffering.

During a regular day we spend many moments thinking negative thoughts, reviewing painful memories or worrying about the future, wishing we could be free of these conflicting emotions.

Occasionally we have blissful moments, feelings of peace, altruistic love or we feel the joy of synchronicity. But for most of us the fearful inner self-talk starts again and we soon fall back into familiar unpleasant feelings.

What if we can train our mind to cultivate these wholesome blissful feelings?

The moment we have a new experience, neurons in our brain organise in a pattern causing the release of chemicals, which are our feelings or emotions.

We have the amazing ability to memorise the emotional reaction. Our emotions colour us, add flavour to our personalities and determine the way we think and act.

Strong emotions are highly addictive and they give the body a rush of energy. Through memory, we tend to repeat experiences which produce these strong emotions and over time it becomes part of our IDENTITY and REALITY.

The moment we produce a thought, the brain sends a signal to the body to produce a chemical - either happy or unhappy feeling.

True danger lies in repetitive negative feelings because the moment we feel negative, we think more negative thoughts and the cycle of thinking and feeling conditions our body to memorise this emotion even better than our conscious mind.

This process is called a habit and results in our body controlling our reactions rather than our mind.

If we want to change our emotion, some aspect of ourselves or the habit, we have to start un-memorising that emotion and thought.

According to Dr Joe Dispenza, almost 95 per cent of who we are sits in our subconscious memory system. To our disadvantage, all memorised behaviour and emotional reactions happen behind the scenes of our awareness.

To implement the change, we are using barely five per cent of our conscious mind compared with 95 per cent of our powerful subconscious mind.

As a result we think positively but feel negatively.

We pray for new life, but we feel guilty, creating a mind body disharmony.

To make a permanent change not only do we have to un-memorise the emotion but also we need to re-condition the body to the new mind.

Meditation is a powerful tool to access the operating system of the subconscious mind and enables us to make measurable changes.

In Tibetan, the word ‘meditation’ means ‘to become familiar with’.

Meditation leads us to become familiar with or aware of our thoughts, our unconscious thoughts, emotions and behaviours and our habits. In other words, the fact that we pay attention to our being means that we can modify our behaviours to do a better job in life.

Meditation allows people to create more coherence in their brain, thereby shortening the reflective period between emotion and reaction, also called emotional intelligence.

A privilege for humans is the ability to make thoughts more real than anything else. The moment you are in meditation – and you are dreaming or you are rehearsing a new way of being, if you are truly focused and paying attention – there will come a moment when your brain becomes so activated, the thoughts become the experience. Your mind and body, not knowing the difference between reality and imagination react to the new emotion, become aware and work together towards a new destiny.

As we learn to control our inner environment, to our surprise our outer environment begins to change as if by magic. Most people wait for a crisis, drama, loss or disease to bring change, realising they cannot continue living in the same way. Only then do they question their thinking and behaviours, and seek answers.

We can learn and change in a state of suffering or we can learn and change in a state of joy and inspiration.

Meditation helps you choose your experiences and brings a state of ‘being aware of true self’.

Through meditation you can de-nurture your ego, forget your problems, pains and identity and literally loose track of time and space.

Your energy moves from the survival centres in your body right up to the heart and you feel inspired.

Dr Joe Dispenza believes people live in a state of survival or in a state of creation.

According to his study, 90 per cent of people live 90 per cent of the time out of survival, from the emotion of stress and mobilising energy for emergency – fight/flight mechanism.

Stressful emotions of hate, anger and pain become addictive and to survive, the ego is endorsed to be selfish and self-centred.

As if you are a gazelle chased by a lion, your only concerns are your body, your environment and how much time you have to escape.

In this state, the gazelle does not pay attention to the repair of her body, nurturing or creation, and the chemical cocktail produced during stress breaks down the body.

Every organism is designed for short-term stress, however humans can make thought more real than anything else; we can turn on our stress response just by thought alone.

If we think of a worry, the brain produces the same chemicals and body responses.

The body and subconscious mind cannot discriminate between reality and worry.

In meditation, we can fabricate emotions of love, joy and gratitude to such a degree that your body and subconscious mind believe the future reality is already happening.

Through mediation your body activates your heart; you become less analytical and less judgmental.

If you want to create a new personal reality, you have to change. So change the brain and body in meditation before the environment forces the change.