Pam Strand (00:01):
Welcome to the Longevity Gym. My name is Pam Strand. I'm your podcast host. This podcast is accumulation of what I have learned over the past 20 years as a personal trainer and life coach and what I have learned in my own journey of what helps us age strong and age better. In this episode, I want to talk about meditation and also share a meditation I wrote for I have found that meditation is such a powerful tool to help us in this journey called life and help us get better as we go. Developing a meditation practice is hygiene for the mind and the brain. It keeps our minds clear, it helps us be in control of our attention, our emotions, our thoughts, even our behaviors. It promotes brain health. There is scientific evidence that meditation adds gray matter to our brains. Meditation, in other words, is a way that we can help our minds and our brains stay healthy and strong as we age.
(01:03):
In today's world, our minds have been trained to go in so many different directions and be in so many different places, seemingly all at the same time, and our attention ends up going on autopilot. It goes where our thoughts take it or where the external demands say it ought to go. As a result, we have little control over our attention and we lose our choice or the ability to have a choice of where we want to go and where we want to be. This is to our detriment. It's draining to our mental and physical energy, and this situation can result in negative thought patterns, physical and mental stress and life feeling. Just a little bit out of balance, I have my own meditation story. I was introduced to it many years ago in a yoga program and I meditated because it is what we did.
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I loved practicing yoga and meditation was part of it, so I meditated without giving it much more thought than that, and I eventually fell out of the practice. Fast forward 20 some years to the Covid Pandemic, and to make a long story short, I was searching for something to help ease the negative impact the pandemic and the virus itself had on me mentally and physically. Synchronicity was definitely at play. A friend suggested that I look at a yoga master's website for online classes and meditations, and when I checked his website, there was a notice that something called MBSR was starting soon. MBSR stands for mindfulness-based Stress Reduction. It's a course developed by Dr. John Cabot Zi, who is recognized as bringing mindfulness to the forefront in our John Cabot Zinn developed the course after discovering stress was a significant obstacle to his medical patient's healing process.
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The course proved to be a significant success and it is now taught around the world. It was through this course that I reconnected with the practice of meditation. There was one thing in the course that really caught my attention and my imagination. That was mindfulness and meditation impact the health of ourselves for the better. My mind was blown away by the fact that something so simple as sitting quietly for a few minutes each day and focusing my attention could actually change the course of my health, and it did for me, and I'm still blown away by the magnitude of the benefit meditation can have on our health. We have 100 trillion cells in our body. If meditation can improve the health of even some of those even just a little bit, we have such an opportunity to be healthier. I saw and felt the healing power of meditation and was compelled to study it deeper and to become a certified meditation teacher.
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Science suggests many benefits from a meditation practice. It improves cellular health, just like I mentioned, and in my mind, that means slowing biological aging. There are physical health benefits to practicing meditation. There's improved cardiovascular health, reduced blood pressure. Meditation improves the quality of our sleep, it reduces pain. There are mental health benefits as well. Meditation improves our mental states, our moods, and minimizes the impact of depression, helps us control anxiety and promotes emotional health. There are some indications that it may reduce age-related memory loss, and many people may relate to this. Meditation calms the monkey mind.
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We also develop skills through a meditation practice. It develops our ability to zoom into situations and notice details and great clarity, but it also gives us the ability to zoom out and look at the big picture. We developed a skill to pause and then respond to situations. There are many skills developed in self-awareness and acceptance, and in managing our emotional states, we developed a skill to be kind to ourselves and others. Curiosity, problem solving. Those skills are enhanced through meditation, and we can experience all these benefits with consistent daily practice in as little as three to five minutes a day. So what is meditation? Meditation refers to a set of techniques that give us a focal point that we use to train our attention, and by meditating and using these techniques, we are training our attention in three ways. We learn how to consciously and by choice direct our attention to where we want it to go. We are also learning too how to train our attention so we notice when our attention runs away from us and gets caught up in our thoughts. The third way our attention is trained is we learn the skill to redirect our attention when it runs away back to where we want it to be.
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Things that make meditation, meditation are these, it's a conscious choice to meditate, and it's a conscious choice to direct your attention to a focal point. That focal point could be an image, a physical sensation like breathing or the focal point could be words or a sound you say to yourself or speak out loud. There's also a quality of mind that makes meditation. Meditation. In meditation, we have an open non-analytical, non reactionary mind. There are many, many meditation techniques, so numerous that I couldn't list them in this episode, but there are two main categories to be aware of. There's one category, excuse me, category called focused concentration where we focus our attention on something specific and there's open awareness where we observe what comes into our awareness.
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The best technique or techniques are the ones that are right for you that you like and find useful and helpful, and it takes experimenting with different types of meditation techniques to find the right ones for you. The typical meditation session is either sitting or laying, still in a quiet place with a relaxed posture, but not so relaxed to invite sleep. Consistent practice is what leads to the benefits. As you become more experienced with meditation, you can make almost any experience meditative walking or moving or eating, taking a shower, brushing your teeth, doing the dishes. Meditation really is anywhere that you can consciously direct your attention to the experience with an open non-analytical mind, noticing what the experience is like without reacting to it. That's what meditation looks like.
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When I discuss meditation with people, I hear one big objection and that is they don't have a quiet mind. They can't quiet it, and therefore they can't meditate. But that's the point of meditation training or in many cases retraining the mind to be still and not so busy. In fact, the mind is very active in meditation because the mind does what it does. It churns out thoughts. A lot of them. In some cases it's estimated or by some sources. It's estimated that our mind generates 60,000 thoughts a day and almost half of them are repetitive.
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In its simplest form, meditation is a technique that trains and retrains the mind to not get caught up in all of those thoughts and to have the thoughts that we want to have. When we practice meditation consistently, we get really good at noticing when the mind gets busy, gets overloaded, and we get really good at noticing when our thoughts kidnap our attention, and then we get really good at bringing our attention back to what we have chosen as our focal point in real life. This helps us to respond to relationships in an open, non-judgmental way to be fully engaged and fully productive to projects in our personal life or at home. It gives us mental power to creatively solve problems, to become more aware of our strengths and our vulnerabilities. And meditation helps us also understand where we may be overly critical of ourselves, and it gives us a path to practice self-forgiveness and kindness. Not to mention meditation gives us a simple and assessable way to increase our health mentally and physically. And after you meditate for a while, you'll also understand that meditation gives you more enjoyment and satisfaction in life. There are some things to watch out for when you meditate. There are things to watch out for in meditation. One is to come to meditation with a specific goal in mind. That just sets us us up for disappointment because the aim in meditation is not necessarily, it's not really to obtain a specific goal,
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But it's to give us greater ability to accomplish the things we want to accomplish in life.
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There are also sometimes unwanted effects of meditation. Meditation can bring up buried or suppressed emotions. There is some evidence that suggests some meditators panic attacks, especially if that's something they're susceptible to. So you want to make sure you can safely deal with these unwanted effects should they happen. It is important to note that meditation is not therapy. It is a long-term journey that can be healing and nourishing, but it is definitely not therapy. If you have any questions, whether meditation is healthy and safe for you, be sure to check in with your doctor. Next, I have included a 10 minute meditation using one of the simplest techniques, turning your attention to your breathing. You may want to pause the audio here while you get situated in a quiet place, or maybe come back to this later. Either way, I hope you enjoy it.
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Welcome to this guided breathing meditation. Go ahead and find a comfortable seated position. Let your chair support your back and an upright spine, feet flat on the floor. If that's comfortable for you, your hands in your lap, left hand cradling in your right hand, palms up and open, and let that positioning allow your shoulders to relax and your chest to lift. Gently close your eyes if you haven't already. Now, breathe full breaths. Easy yet, complete breaths through your nose if possible. And as you do this, let the body relax and soften and let the breath, particularly the out breath, wash away any distractions that keep you or take you away from this moment. And in this way, let your breathing open you to your awareness of your body. Breathing now begin to tune your attention even more to your breath. And instead of watching your breath, or maybe in addition to watching your breath begin to feel and sense the rhythm and the flow of your body breathing. In today's meditation, we are going to practice letting the body breathe on its own and follow its own course. If it's uncomfortable, breathing through your nose for whatever reason, open your mouth slightly and feel your body's breath on your lips.
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As your body breathe, notice where you might be holding tension along its way. Do you have tight facial muscles, a clenched jaw? Maybe you've tightened your throat, your chest is rigid, are holding your belly tight? Are you holding it in? If you notice any tension, see if you can relax or soften that area of the body and just let the body breathe. If your mind wanders, bring it right back. Gently though to your breathing body, maybe noticing what tension may have arisen in the body with the wandering mind. See if you can release that tension too. If you sense a need to control or find yourself trying to regulate your breath, see if it can release this need and surrender to your body and let your body use its own wisdom to breathe as it needs. Just continue to relax. Continue to trust your breathing body. Let it lead and let it support you.
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If at any time the sensations are too intense or too distracting, focus your attention back to your breathing body. Its rhythm and this calming river of breath flowing through your beam. Let your awareness embrace this beautiful flow, this life-giving and life sustaining flow, embracing not just the breath itself but the body, creating and moving the breath, the embodied breath. Our breath is a wonderful indicator of how we're doing. If we are stressed, it may be shorted quick. Or if we are rushed, our breath may feel forced. It will speed up if we are exercising and slow down when we are at rest. Even our habits of posture or our thinking patterns can restrict or impede our body's access and use of oxygen. If we learn to tune in, we gain awareness how our life's journey is going, how it is unfolding. Can you sense today the beauty of giving your body the time to breathe on its own, putting your needs on the back burner and letting the body nourish itself on its own pace, with its own wisdom and in turn nourish you and your soul? As this meditation comes to a close, take a moment to savor your breathing body. Feel warm and tender feelings toward your body, and the gift that your breath is,
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Will you make the commitment to take time each day to let your body breathe on its own time, and as a result, bring more health and vitality to your life? When you are ready, bring your awareness back to your presence in your chair Gently though as if you're tiptoeing back into your presence so as not to disrupt the flow of your breathing body. And now gently open your eyes and come back into your room. And may you carry this piece with you throughout the remainder of your day. Namaste.