36 Benefits of Meditation
The benefits of meditation come at three levels, which require increasing levels of skill.
Concentration Level Benefits
The simplest benefits require only good concentration (called dharana) to attain exceptional awareness. You can fulfill these intentions without changing your sense of self or identity. (What most people think of as meditation is actually concentration. Meditation’s benefits are listed further below. ) Here are some examples of benefits of concentration, which are all very valuable:
- Calm your mind by focusing on the sensation of breathing
- Attain internal awareness by feeling your heartbeat in your chest or your pulse
- Attain coherence by coordinating your breath to your heartbeat
- Attain a profound state of relaxation
- Feel relief from pain in an injured area
- Calm your stomach and bowels
- Feel tingling energy in your hands, a sign of healing energy
- Feel expansive pressure in your forehead, a sign of developing insight
- Holding food in your hand, experience its digestion and what effect it would have on you
- Experience the depth of your feeling about a person or situation
- Reprogram your subconscious patterns by repetitive affirmations or sacred words
- Send a wave of peace to another person
Contemplation Level Benefits
The second set of benefits requires a shift in your consciousness to a different time, space or person. To attain these benefits, you’ll need advanced methods to attain the state called “Contemplation” (dhyana). Here are some examples of Contemplation benefits.
- Without sight or touch, feel within yourself the condition of a plant or animal
- Feel the emotion of another person as your own emotion
- Place yourself in a distant space that was very inspiring, like a home or retreat place
- Shift the present moment to a time in the past to re-experience a significant event as now
- Shift the present moment forward to experience your last living hour as now
- Identify with a teacher and enter the teacher’s meditation
- Identify with and feel your energy body
- Feel what it’s like to be inside your heart
- Hear the voice of your heart and listen to its specific guidance about your life
- Claim and explore a hidden quality of yourself that you’ve seen in another
- Instead of doing a meditation, let the meditation do you: ride the magic carpet
- Recognize your ideal in the heart of every person
Meditation Level Benefits
The third set of benefits requires real meditation, where you experience the Unlimited in one of its aspects: eternity, infinity or perfection.
- Listen to the ‘sound of the spheres” coming from within; see the colors and shapes of the inner light
- Attain the state of no blame of anyone for anything
- Experience unconditional love, continuously received and given
- Experience yourself as subsumed within all things and beings
- Experience all things and beings as parts of yourself
- Expand the radiance of your heart to interlace the light of the stars
- Feel yourself as you existed before life: your angelic field of light
- Feel yourself as you will continue to be after life: your resurrected self
- Tune yourself to feel the cry of the heart of humanity
- Let yourself be overwhelmed by the cosmic emotions of the universe
- Accept responsibility as the co-creator of your world
- Integrate your body, mind, heart and soul as a full embodiment of Self
These are a few of the extraordinary experiences of the Unlimited Self. All of these benefits, at all three levels, are available to anyone who is willing to learn and practice meditation. See The Promise of Heart Rhythm Meditation.
Blessings,
Puran Bair Chancellor, University of the Heart
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