The Benefits of Meditation

Meditation Benefits - Two Important Versions
There are two main modes of meditation. The mindfulness method familiarizes RI with the thoughts and urges of lower level subsystems. Pure meditation focuses the mind on a single word or object, stilling all the intelligences including RI. Mindfulness meditation may yield quicker benefits, since it makes RI familiar with the habitual forms of negative thinking. Such familiarity effectively subdues such thoughts. Pure meditation may achieve the same results by forcing an integration of thoughts within a subconscious process. Pure meditation has been proved to have significant medical benefits. This article focuses on the benefits of mindfulness meditation for effective mind control.

Meditation Benefits - The Mindfulness Principle
In this form of meditation, the Buddhists advised “staring back” at your thoughts. Matthieu Ricard, a respected Buddhist monk said: "One may wonder what people do in retreats, sitting for eight hours a day. They familiarize themselves with a new way of dealing with the arising of thoughts. When you start getting used to recognizing thoughts as they arise, it is like rapidly spotting someone you know in a crowd. When a powerful thought or anger arises, you recognize it. That helps you to avoid being overwhelmed by this thought."

Meditation Benefits - Mindfulness And Pattern Recognition
Mindfulness meditation becomes familiar with and stills the lower level emotional control systems, assembled by nature, for animal survival. The early reptilian brains used smells to control survival responses. Identification of smells made the animal attack, flee, or consume/reject food. From smells, nature moved up to emotions, based on event recognition systems. Unpleasant events were remembered. Subsequently, hints of the possibility of such events triggered fear, or anger. Later mammalian brains added evaluation of social events to trigger responses. RI is the latest version, which uses a purely rational evaluation to impel responses. All these systems exist within your brain. Inevitably, subconscious mechanisms within your mind ceaselessly evaluate myriad survival strategies, including irrational ones. Mindfulness meditation uses RI to still the irrational urges of its colleagues.

Meditation Benefits - A Fortunate Twist For RI
Focused attention stills unrelated neural activity. When you focus your attention on your toe, the touch sensory neurons in your toe will fire more rapidly and still the neighboring neurons. Increased firing makes you aware of the pressure of your shoe on your toe. Maunsell studied neural signals in the visual area of the cortex of monkeys, when viewing a swarm of dots on a screen. In the related cortical region, specific neurons fired for specific dots. When the animal focused on just one of the dots, the directed attention caused the neurons that signaled its motion to respond more strongly. At the same time, neural signals related to other dots were attenuated or filtered out. Meditation is a process, where RI focuses on a thought, word, or object. The fortunate side effect of focused attention is the stilling of unrelated neural activities.

Meditation Benefits - Feeling/Emotion Link
Emotions trigger thoughts in your mind. Social emotions are known to be triggered from the insulae, organs in your brain. The same region is activated by a range of feelings, including sharp pain, burning pain, cool or warm temperature, itching, muscle contraction, muscle burn because of lactic acid, joint movements, soft touch, mechanical stress, tickling, flushing, hunger and thirst. Thus your emotions also trigger physical feelings - cold fear, or a warm hug. In mindfulness meditation, you will become aware that your more common emotions come with subtle physical feelings. Thus, in the 300-400 milliseconds period, in which an emotion is triggered, you will also be able to detect a physical feeling related to the emotion. Familiarity with such signals is a byproduct of mindfulness meditation.

Meditation Benefits - Stilling of An Emotion
There is a mechanical switch. When your RI recognizes the start of a familiar feeling related to an emotion, the onset of that emotion is instantly inhibited! Suppose you get a knot in your stomach, whenever you are summoned to the executive floor. Become familiar with that feeling. Next time, when you get that upstairs call, recognize the knot. You will have pulled a pattern recognition switch. The raw fear, which you usually experienced, will just vanish. Provided you also followed all the Mind Control Tips. That process of recognition results from mindfulness meditation. Emotions also trigger voices in your mind. Angry words, or guilty ones. Listen and you will hear many familiar voices. You will get the “Aha!” feeling of discovery, when you realize they are not your own. Familiarity will kill most of the unwanted and unpleasant thoughts.