10 Reasons Why You Should Meditate
- Gain Inner Peace How often do you clean and tidy your room? When you don’t housekeep your room for an extended period of time, there will be so much dirt accumulated that it becomes an unpleasant place to live in. The air you breathe in will be unclean. The things will be untidy and disorganized. You can’t get things as productively as before. Imagine your body as a room. Every day, there is lots of junk that gets piled into ourselves – our mind, body, heart and soul. These junk come in the form of negative thoughts, emotions and energy. They can come from all sorts of different sources – the media, interactions with people, our environment, our work, or even self-generated from within. If you don’t meditate regularly, these junk accumulates over time inside you. You become a living trash container with junk thoughts and emotions. Ever have occasions where thoughts seem to spring out of nowhere in your mind in a time when you do not require them? Occasions where negative memories crop up and you didn’t want them to be emerging? These are all part of the clutter that you should be disposing of, but haven’t. During meditation, you clear all these junk out of your system, just like you cleaning out your room. You expel the negativity and return it to the earth to be converted into positive energy. In the end, you are no longer bogged down by them. For people who don’t meditate, it takes a longer period of time to remove all the compounded negativity from the past. But just like cleaning a very messy house, all it takes is slightly more time and more effort before all the mess is eventually cleaned out. After my regular meditations, I have reached a point of absolute calmness in my mind. It made me realize how noisy my previous unmeditated mind was and I was not even aware of it if I hadn’t had this benchmark for comparison. This is a state which you can only experience for yourself after you start meditation. In fact, my mind is so quiet that I’m able to literally ‘hear’ thoughts as and when they come into my mind. This has increased my awareness level of my thoughts, leading to the second benefit – Increase of your self-awareness.
- Increase Your Self-Awareness
- Makes You Grounded and Calmer During meditation, you stop becoming attached to the physical world and you start becoming a third party observer to your reality. You become an observer to the kind of thoughts and feelings that run through you. You become an observer to how people act around you. You become an observer to the things in your environment. You stop becoming ruled by your ego and you become more aligned with your higher self. With that detachment, you become grounded, calmer and more level headed. The gap between the stimulus and your response widens. For everything happening around me, I find plenty of time to observe, process and assess in my mind, even more so than normal, even though everything is unfolding in real time. It’s really quite interesting. In the past, there may have been events which result in consciousness lowering behavior where you reacted out of your normal persona. Meditation enables you to deal with these events effectively without having your consciousness lowered. You become able to handle them objectively and in a detached manner without interference from your ego.
- Makes You Present This comes about due to your groundedness. When you are grounded, you are more present to your reality. You stop getting caught up by what happened in the past or what might happen in the future. People who are not present are often bogged down by many other things on their mind. They are too busy handling the thoughts in their brain to function in their full capacity in their present moment. With meditation, you begin to live fully in the present moment. This lets you react better to the situations around you. It includes being more focused, efficient, attentive and receptive. You maximize every moment of your living life by living in the present moment.
- Increase Your Consciousness
- Source of Inspiration Most of us are probably using only about 1% of our brain. This 1% is what’s controllable by our physical selves and our ego. The remaining 99% of our intelligence resides in our subconscious mind. This 99%, and not the 1%, is where the most powerful ideas lie. This is where we get our inspiration, our greatest ideas, our best solutions to problems. The power of our subconscious mind is one which many past leaders have tapped into, such as Thomas Edison, Buddha, Jesus, Confucius, Einstein, and many others. People who work in occupations that require a great deal of creativity, such as artists and musicians, are either naturally able to access their subconsciousness or have learned to do it. Through meditation, we attune ourselves to that 99% which we shut out in our physical life. This is like a secret pass toward instant new ideas and solutions which we couldn’t have generated with our conscious mind. If you have a frustrating dilemma you cannot resolve, or you are looking for new ideas for something you are working on, try meditating on them and see what you get. Through constant practice, you will strengthen your connection with your subconscious mind. In no time, you will find the solutions generated by your subconscious mind are often more insightful and better than the ones generated by your conscious mind.
- Rejuvenates You All of us are essentially made up of energy. We have 7 energy centres, called chakras, where energy flows from. Sometimes, we experience energy blockages due to certain problems in our life, injuries in our body, etc. When you meditate, you clear these energy blockages, clean your chakras and facilitate the flow of energy around you. There are various visualization exercises which enable you to do that. After your meditation, you will find yourself rejuvenated and energized. A room needs to be cleaned and cleared regularly to be in a conducive state. A computer operating system needs to be defragged regularly to keep it optimal. A table needs to be wiped often to remove the dust and dirt that’s piled on top of it. Likewise, you need to meditate daily to be in your prime condition.
- Cures Insomnia One of the key reasons for insomnia is the bombardment of thoughts in your mind which result in anxiety, stress and depression. Meditation clears out the clutter in your mind (see benefit #1), which lets you slip easily into sleep. A few years ago, there was a time when I was suffering from insomnia. After meditating for about 20 minutes, I eased into sleep immediately, much to my surprise. In addition, the meditation also improved my quality of sleep. When you sleep, your mind is sorting out your mental clutter. Meditating before you sleep removes the clutter and sets your mind for a more peaceful rest. If there is a huge barrage of clutter in your mind, it will take a longer period of meditation to cure your insomnia. Just keep up with the regular meditation and you will find an improvement in your situation.
- Increases Your Spiritual Connection
- Increase Your Fulfillment of Life All in all, the different benefits of meditation combine to give you an increased fulfillment of life. You gain increased mastery of yourself, become more positive and become rejuvenated. The sharpening of your saw through meditation puts you in the position to get even more out of every day living.


