How does mindfulness boost your health?
Stress levels in the modern world are soaring and so it’s no surprise that mindfulness is almost everywhere. Being mindful means living in the ‘here and now’, engaging in the present moment with full awareness. Mindfulness allows you to experience and enjoy the moment rather than being on ‘automatic pilot’ and rushing through life. Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh says “I’ll use the term mindfulness to refer to keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality.”
Mindfulness and meditation go hand in hand and experts from around the globe have done numerous studies showing that regular practice boosts your immune system. Meditation is a great way of training your mind and learning how to be a master rather than a slave to it. Research proves that your levels of anxiety drop while niggling worries and fears seem to fade away.
During meditation, there are important structural changes that take place in your brain. Researchers at Harvard Medical School discovered that regular meditators have far stronger immune systems, compared to those who don’t meditate. Essentially this is because those who practise meditation have more active disease-fighting genes that protect you from a wide range of disorders. These include pain, infertility, insomnia, depression, high blood pressure and Alzheimer’s disease. ”We found a range of disease-fighting genes were active in the relaxation practitioners that were not active in the control group,” says Dr Herbert Benson, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who led the research. Further research shows that after two months, the meditators discovered that genes that protect the body from cancer all began to ‘switch on’.
This research is groundbreaking in that it shows just how powerful the effects of meditation can be. Unlike the stereotypical image, meditation isn’t simply about relaxing on a cushion and zoning out! There are lots of people who are well-known practitioners of meditation including the actor Clint Eastwood who said, “meditation with me was just a self-reliant thing. I’ve been doing it for almost forty years.” Russell Brand uses meditation to deal with his addiction issues while Oprah Winfrey, Goldie Hawn, Eva Mendes and Arianna Huffington are all proponents of meditation.
Another benefit of regular meditation is the anti-ageing effects that it has. Dr Eva Selhub, the medical director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute says, “If we can affect the stress response, we can affect the aging process. There’s a reason why experienced meditators live so long and look so young.”
In an interview with CNN, Dan Buettner, author of ‘The Blue Zones’ and researcher into longevity around the world, revealed that meditation can add up to 10 years to your life. On that note, I’m off to meditate!
If you’re interested in taking private meditation/mindfulness classes, please drop me an e-mail sarah@oncloudzen.com
Love,
