Thursday, November 11, 2010

The Biggest Lie - Meditating is not a High Priority

It took me over 2 years to understand the immense benefits of meditation before I started meditating this year. It's been over 6 months - still a rookie, it's difficult and needs patience but I am sticking to it get those "10,000 hours" Penelope is going through the same vacillating phase I went through for years. Some excellent points from her post:

  • The Happiness Advantage, says that meditation, just five minutes a day, is one of the most reliable ways to increase our natural tendency toward happiness.
  • Marine Corps is using meditation to help troops cope with the stress of warfare. The Marines were totally skeptical at first, of course, but in Men’s Journal  there’s a great article by Vanessa Gregory about how the Marines became believers.
  • Many professional athletes meditate because at that level, everyone has the skills to be the best, but only a few have the mental strength to use those skills in the toughest moments.
  • It’s insane not to meditate because it helps all aspects of your life—intellectual, emotional, physical. And it only takes five minutes. You just need to sit for five minutes, and even if you are terrible at meditating and your mind races and you struggle to sit still, those five minutes are still beneficial.
  •  Some of the most influential (on me) research I've ever featured on this blog is from Roy Baumeister who shows (repeatedly) that self-discipline snowballs; if you add one, small thing that requires self-discipline, and do it day after day, exerting self-discipline in other areas because easier.
How can we be cool and meditate at the same time?. It's not only cool to meditate but meditation makes us literally "cool" sans the coldness. Yes, neuroscience behind meditation might nudged to embark on this mindfulness journey but the most important trait we will inherit in this journey - "Not by how good we are when there is no pressure, but on how well we handle ourselves when everything is going wrong."


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