How Meditation Works

With an analogy that everyone can relate to

How? By giving you mindfulness

We've all heard about the wonderful benefits of meditation — gaining mindfulness; moment-to-moment awareness of your thoughts, bodily sensations and environment. And it has been proven to lead to greater productivity, mastery of emotions , and a stronger immune system. But what is this mysterious mindfulness and how does it work to give you all of the above? After 240 consecutive days of meditation(approximately 60 hours), I've come to see it this way:

Enter your mind, without mindfulness

The untrained mind works a lot like a computer running on Windows, except without the task bar and close button. Here’s an illustration:

Imagine using this computer. Without a task bar, there’s no easy way to keep track of open programs, and with no close button, your best alternative is to minimize and keep the unwanted programs out of sight, while they’re still wasting away at your processing power — causing lag. Eventually, you would have so many programs open but minimized that your computer slows to a crawl, and overheats. So you restart it. But before long, the cycle repeats. Over a long period of time, using the computer this way accelerates wear and tear.

Just like this computer, the untrained mind constantly has a million thoughts racing through it. Some are important, most aren't. We can sort of shut out the noise and get by, but these thoughts still inhibit our mental capacity, making us less focused and productive. The worst part is that we hardly notice it until we fall behind on deadlines and experience burn out. Getting lots of sleep helps to clear the mind, but it gets clouded and disorganized by distractions and mental noise before long. There’s a better way to do things.

Solutions

It’s easy to solve the computer problem. Just press Ctrl+Alt+Del to launch the task manager, and you’ll be able to close unwanted programs and track CPU usage percentage. You also have the good old task bar and close buttons on normal computers to help with staying organized.

There’s a simple solution for the challenge we face as well, and it’s called mindfulness. By practicing meditation, we train our ability to be mindful. We’re able hit Ctrl+Alt+Del in our heads to monitor our emotions, energy levels, and thoughts. Once we gain our inner task bars, close buttons, and task managers, it becomes a simple matter of using them to manage our minds, thus getting rid of mental lag to increase productivity, noticing and addressing stress to improve our health, and accepting and overcoming our emotions to master them.

Meditation crash-course — Ctrl+Alt+Del in mind-terms is read: Sit comfortably. Eyes closed, neck lengthened. Inhale, exhale. Listen only to your breathing, gently push away other thoughts that you hear in your mind. It is normal to hear things other than breathing. Letting them go and gently bringing your attention and focus back to your breathing is the art of meditation itself. Continue for 5 minutes.

If this article helped you to understand meditation better, pass it along! Show this to anyone that questions the benefits of meditation. Show them the way.