Personal Growth
Meditation empowers you to accept changes necessary for personal growth.
Personal growth is all about improving yourself and your life in relation to your health, happiness, relationships, self-esteem, attitude, wisdom, well-being, and the list goes on. It’s also about overcoming fear and breaking emotional bad habits.
Once you decide to improve your life, you’ll have to empower yourself to bring about this change. This empowerment can come only from within when you tune into your inner self; it can come only when your mind is calm, quiet and peaceful. And, meditation will help you achieve this state of tranquility and calmness of mind.
Not only does meditation help in perceiving the inner self, it also makes processing information in the brain more efficient. You become alert and more attentive. This has been confirmed by a research which showed that intensive mental training through meditation improved information processing by the brain thus reducing ‘attentional-blink’. When two pieces of information are presented in a very quick succession, the brain can’t perceive the second information because it is still processing the first one. This is known as attentional-blink. Meditation, especially the Buddhist compassion meditation vipassana, helps reduce the duration of the attentional-blink. The study also suggests that brain has the ability to adapt throughout life.
Apart from promoting happiness and calmness, and improving your attention levels, meditation can help you manage destructive emotions such as anger, hatred or jealousy and make you more compassionate and ‘accepting’. Studies have shown that compassion meditation (vipassana) helps reduce stress-induced behavioral responses viz. destructive emotions.
Similarly, when you witness someone in an emotional state, you may tend to experience the same emotion. This is known as empathy reaction. A University of Wisconsin study found that those who meditate show an increased empathy reaction. This indicates that meditation can inculcate a greater capacity for empathy. And empathy is a superior human quality.
The fact that compassion reflects extreme wellbeing has been reinforced scientifically through various studies on meditation. Assisting friends in need and volunteer work benefit both, the receiver as well as the person giving it.
Meditation can certainly help make a Better You!
