5 EVIDENCE-BASED WAYS daily meditation CAN CHANGE LIFE AS YOU KNOW IT

1. Get Control of Busy (and often Anxious) Thoughts

What would it feel like to have your thoughts better under your control? To be able to, at will, quickly recognize thought patterns, correct them, redirect them, influence them, and guide yourself out of unwanted thoughts?

For one thing, I can tell you with certainty that we wouldn't be worried as much. We wouldn't be seeing (or creating) phantom problems. We wouldn't live in fight-or-flight mode every day. We could relax, be ourselves, experience our potential, and make real progress in our lives. We would be able to identify and stop those negative, intrusive, disruptive, and often limiting thought patterns that take over and can last hours, or days, and in some cases, lifetimes. 

Meditating has been proven to help make marked improvements in our ability to stop disruptive thinking, and replace it with something more real, grounded, and rooted in something GOOD.

Since meditation is cumulative, you can start seeing these benefits pretty quick. You might see some very modest benefits on day one if you're looking for them. But the longer you meditate, the more powerful the benefits become, the more your brain is changing and growing for the better.

This is reason enough for me, but let's keep going just in case I haven't convinced you yet.

2. Meditation makes you smarter

A lot of us grew up being taught that intelligence and IQ are fixed. New science has proven that we actually can improve our IQ score, and our intelligence. Meditation is one way you can do that.

This research study (and others like it) have proven that meditation can give you a boost in your IQ, thinking, and fluid intelligence (reasoning ability, problem solving) . It also creates new neural networks in the brain so that more areas of the brain, that might be dormant, are coming back online, and more areas are talking to each other, sharing information, and working more cohesively together. That means your thinking is becoming more crisp, energetic, efficient, and clear. 

And it's going to feel good.

Meditation creates powerful changes in the brain. You may not feel these changes physically, but you will certainly experience them emotionally and mentally if you are paying attention. Meditation increases grey matter, thickness in the Prefrontal Cortex (responsible for attention, impulse control, and cognitive flexibility) and regulates the amygdala (which is responsible for how upset and flustered we become by things going on around us).

The more consistent your practice, the more consistent your increased level of brain changes. The science is extremely clear, the evidence is overwhelming. It is a fact that meditation can and will improve all of our brains if we can stick to a daily practice.

3. Enhance Your Capacity to Love, Like and To Be Loved and Liked

When you are at your best, people respond to you differently. You respond to people differently. When your mood is elevated, people can feel it, and so can you. Instead of avoiding people, you are connecting. Really connecting. 

Daily meditation puts us in a position to enhance our interpersonal relationships and increase our openness to experience. We become better versions of ourselves, and that makes us much more willing to engage, and enjoy, other people.

We can give our families and friends our best. Sometimes people could really use us at our best, wouldn't you agree?

4. It helps you to improve and master your emotions

Our emotions create the world we live in. If we live in low-vibratory emotions, like worry, guilt, shame, anxiety, fear, defensiveness, powerlessness, heavy emotions and mental states, then that is coloring the content of our lives in drab, dull, monotonous colors. It's not a pretty picture; I have experienced more of this in my life than I had to. We have a responsibility to ourselves to try and live the best life that we can, and that is a life with more positive emotions than negative ones. 

And you can have that. It is possible.

Although we can't always be on an upswing, or in a great mood, and shouldn't strive to be, mediation has been shown to reliably increase positive emotions. It increases our happiness when we practice it regularly. It allows us to even choose emotions that we would like to feel, to tune in to more powerful, high-vibratory states. We can practice with this any time, and start living a life with brighter colors, and a life where we feel more like ourselves.

The full spectrum of benefits are accessed through a consistent, daily practice. We actually learn to get good at meditation over time, and even really enjoy it. 

5. After you practice a while, it feels INCREDIBLE

Although at first meditation can feel challenging, that is only the beginning when we are learning (for the first time, in earnest) how to tame our minds. That's a tall order at first, and it can take a little while for this very busy mind to follow your directives, your intentions. The challenge is great at first. If you can keep going, keep practicing, keep getting better, and have a little faith in the process, it will lead to incredibly beautiful moments down the line, and incredible benefits.

Sometimes with meditation people expect to sit down and feel zen and amazing right away.

To get where we need to go, we need to put in a little work up front and really commit to doing the practice.

The benefits are incredible, but the one that might surprise you the most is how AMAZING it feels to get better at meditation.

When you have a daily practice, you will start to find more and more moments of deep, truly delectable stillness. And often a body buzz, with warmth and vibration, and a sense of bodily peace.  You can get so good that you can dependably create that feeling any time you want. 

If this feeling could be sold in a bottle people would pay anything for it. 

But it's free. It just takes practice.

So when you commit to the practice, and sit down, never be discouraged by a challenging meditation session. That challenge is the upfront payment for all of the emotional freedom, happiness, and peace you will get to experience.