Meditation: Good for the Body as well as the Mind
Certified Journey Meditation Teach Ashby Taylor, at Shape Fitness and Wellness.
The holiday season is right around the corner. Though joy and merriment abound, so do the inevitable stresses that go along with it: Did I get the right gift? Can I afford this Christmas? Will I survive the holiday with the extended family? Will I be able to keep the weight off and manage to stay healthy through all the partying? Is Uncle Lewis going to drink too much and accidentally light the Christmas tree on fire? There will be many challenges, but with some healthy stress-management strategies you might just survive another year.
Excessive stress has been proved to increase cholesterol, blood sugar, triglycerides, risk of heart disease, asthma and accelerated aging, just to name a few issues. Stress can make you fat, depressed, and increase your risk of disease. It is definitely in your best interest to not let the holiday season get to you. Meditation might be the thing to help you do just that. Meditation has been around since the dawn of time in one form or another. All major religions include some kind of mindfulness practice, and it has been pervading popular culture forever. As mentioned in Edge Magazine, “Star Wars included meditation chambers for those who follow the Force. These private inner sanctums are created to reflect upon the future, rejuvenate their inner strength and improve their subtle mental powers. Perhaps the most well-known meditation chamber was built for Darth Vader aboard his Super Star Destroyer, Executor.” If there is anyone who needs an effective stress-management strategy, it’s Darth Vader (talk about extended-family issues!).
There has been a lot of research recently about the power of meditation and its positive effects on stress. A study last December published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research found that “meditation practice leads to decreased physiological markers of stress” including “reduced cortisol (stress hormone), C-reactive protein (inflammatory marker), blood pressure, heart rate, and triglycerides.” Mindfulness mediates the physiological markers of stress. Meditation isn’t something you master right away. You are not going to sit down, legs crossed, and channel Confucius on your first attempt. It takes practice.
Ashby Taylor’s most empowering impact on her beginning practice was finding a community. Taylor is a certified Journey Meditation teacher for Shape Fitness in Stone Harbor. Studying under David Nichtern, a senior teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage, and Stephen Sokoler, founder of Journey Meditation, she learned to combine ancient wisdom with modern science in a powerful, streamlined practice. Finding a community allowed her to ease into meditation semi-regularly.
“I was just trying to sit in silence, which would last for about 1 minute at the beginning,” Taylor says. “Monthly to weekly gatherings, from there, actually provided an accountability partner, like a gym buddy for your brain’s wellness. Showing up each day to your practice allows you to begin training your brain, creating opportunities to feel more relaxed and less stressed. Focusing on your breath, creating these moments of mindfulness during your sit, develops an awareness to bring these practices into each moment throughout your day.”
Mindfulness training has been shown to improve psychological well-being and physical health by developing new emotion-regulation strategies, such as the ability to experience emotions by observing and accepting them without judgment, according to the journal Psychoneuralendochrinology. A study published in August 2017 suggests that “mindfulness training may lead to an enhanced emotional experience coupled with the ability to recover quickly from negative emotional states.” (So, when someone lights your Christmas tree on fire or blows up your Death Star, you are able to recover quickly mentally and physiologically.) “It’s not what you think, it’s how you relate to it.”
Stress relief isn’t solely obtained through meditation. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience put 38 individuals through a three-month yoga and meditation retreat that was able to drastically decrease self-reported anxiety and depression, as well as lowering inflammatory markers and raising anti-inflammatory markers. It hypothesizes that the patterns of change observed reflect mind-body integration and well-being.
So, add some exercise (not high-intensity) and a healthy diet and you will be well on your way. Although I’m not too sure it’s working for Darth Vader. He may have to find an accountability partner.
