Meditation for Mental Health? Read This First. — EastWesticism
Most people think dealing with mental health issues has only two options: medication and talk therapy. What people often don’t realize though is that there are now stacks of literature proving that meditation can help with mental health. Everything from depression to anxiety, bipolar to BPD, addiction to OCD and more.
In this article, I will share some of the literature and studies on how meditation can help with mental health for things like depression, anxiety, BPD, ADD/ADHD, and even schizophrenia. Secondly, I’ll talk about personal stories from my life and others’. And thirdly, I’ll give practical tips on how to use meditation to address mental health.
I do want to mention that I am not a doctor. Furthermore, I am not advising anyone to stop taking medication or to quit their therapy treatment.
However, what I do hope is that I can inspire people struggling with mental health to give meditation a try. I hope one day they can become completely cured of their mental struggles. And hopefully, medical treatment will no longer be needed, as I have experienced firsthand.
I share this information because I don’t want to see one more person suffer or commit suicide. Everyone deserves to know about meditation. And we can all benefit from this incredibly transformative practice.
We are all miraculous manifestations of the infinite universe. When we forget that truth, suffering takes place.
Why Meditation Can Help with Mental Health
When we watch a dramatic movie, we recognize the drama is not happening to us and so we don’t suffer. But life is a movie. It is a very realistic movie and because we can’t turn around and see the projector and projectionist, we believe it is real.
But in reality, life is a story created by our mind. When we meditate, we take a moment to look at our mind, to look at the projector. We peek behind the curtain and notice the light of awareness shining onto whatever we are looking at. The mind is like the movie projector, but our conscious awareness is the lightbulb in the projector that shines through the film making the whole illusion of the movie possible.
Meditation helps us expand our awareness beyond just the thoughts in our mind. Mindfulness isn’t about an empty mind. It is about filling our mind with deeper truths and reality, such as becoming aware of our breath, our conscious awareness, our bodily sensations, and our surroundings.
Meditation is About Becoming Our Own Mental Health Therapist
Nobody chooses to struggle with mental health. It happens completely unconsciously. Unconscious mental patterns, mindsets, habits, snap judgements and reactions create neural pathways in our brain. These pathways become automatic thoughts and behaviors we do unconsciously.
Meditation gives us the chance without distraction to observe the nature of our mind. The more we observe, the wiser we become to how it works. The more conscious we become of our own mind, the less we unconsciously generate mental turmoil and suffering.
For example, you could think of these neural pathways like a snow-covered hill. If you slide down on a sled, the first time you could take any of an infinite number of possible paths. But, the more you go, grooves start to form and you begin to take the same paths over and over again. Each time, the grooves get deeper and deeper. Meditation is like giving your mind a fresh snowfall as you bring consciousness to your unconscious thoughts and behaviors.
Observation is at the root of all scientific inquiry. Therefore, the more we observe and study our own mind, the more of an expert we become. Meditation simply gives us the chance to look and observe, inquire and examine without distraction.
No therapist can peer into our own mind like we can. We just have to take the time to look. Scientists can build incredible telescopes to see distant galaxies or microscopes to see tiny microbial organisms. But we have to build our own inward facing telescopes to look into our own mind. No one else can do it for us. Meditation is the building of that telescope
Here is a spiritual documentary Aloneness to Oneness — Life Changing Film on Non-duality
Originally published at https://www.eastwesticism.org on October 18, 2021.
