Let’s see how meditation helps you…
Meditation usually gets positive praise. Meditation is often thought of as something that benefits us in many ways. The ways that meditation is proclaimed to benefit us, is through things such as making us happier, upbeat, more compassionate, healthier, and all round better people. Are these claims about meditation true? We are going to look at whether meditation really lives up to the hype. Whether it really makes us better people.
Let’s Start with Whether Meditation Makes us Happier:
There are many research studies that show that meditation makes us happier. One of these research studies is from a group of University professors from Japan. It is titled, ‘The structural neural substrate of subjective happiness’. This research found that meditation increases happiness in a person. This is because meditation increases grey matter in the brain. Grey matter in the brain is linked to happiness. Therefore, the more grey matter you have, the happier you will be.
Our happiness often comes down to how our brain functions and brain matter. Basically, happiness is partly to do with the matter within our brain. However, recent research shows that meditation studies can be biased. This could be true, if you have studies which ask people who conduct the study who are not objective. But, even then, if you have consistent studies which show that meditation makes people happier, then that shows us that there is evidence to suggest that it does make us happier.
What is irrefutable, is the studies which are science based, such as the grey matter studies. These studies provide us with pictures from brain scans that show how different the brains are with someone who has a lot of grey matter and someone who only has a little grey matter. When you have these brain scans, and people telling us that they are happier and meditate, then that tells us that people who meditate, are happier than people who don’t meditate.
Now let’s look at whether meditation makes us more compassionate. Research also shows us that meditation makes us more compassionate. There are several research studies which indicates that meditation makes us more compassion. However, we are going to focus on one specific research study.
That study is from the University of Rochester, where scientists discovered that meditation does make us more compassionate. The researchers focused on the way that people spoke to one another. It also focused on things like their body language, to determine whether they were compassionate. They found that compassionate people were more concerned with how other people were doing. This was noticed through their tone of voice and through their body language.
Next, researchers have also found that meditation makes us healthier, this is from a separate research. Researchers from Harvard found that meditation particularly benefits things like our mental health, reduces stress and uplifts our mood and become happier.
As we have seen so far, mediation can bring us many positive attributes, such as making us more compassionate people. However, the question is, does meditation make us overall better people?
Let us Take a Look:
Recent research has shown some interesting results when it comes to meditation. It found that meditation does indeed make us more compassionate. However, the researchers also found that compassion is limited. The researchers found that meditation did not have an impact on things like aggression or prejudice. In other words, meditation might increase compassion in some areas, but it doesn’t in other areas namely – being aggressive and not increasing patience or reducing prejudices.
Meditation is limited to what it does to our emotions and behavior. In some ways it has positive effects. But, in other ways, it makes no difference. More significantly, the research found that there is a problematic element with the way meditation studies can be done. They found that some meditation studies were done by meditation teachers, this influenced the result of the meditation research. As meditation teachers are not objective, any study done by them can be biased. Either, intentionally biased or biased through being unaware of it – subconsciously biased.
For us to understand whether or not meditation makes us better people, we have to look at studies beyond those that meditation teachers hold. The researchers found that meditation often makes us feel better and more compassionate. However, it helps to develop overall attributes of goodness.
Finally, we are going to look at what meditation is the best to make you a better person. There are several types of meditation but the best one to make you a better person, is called the Yoga Sound Meditation. As its name suggests, this meditation is a system of inner cultivation that has been passed down from yoga meditation masters to their disciples since time immemorial.