Who Meditates?
The increasing pace of modern life seems never ending. Stress is everywhere, a major cause of ill health and unhappiness, not only in adults but children too. At Relax for Health, we have proven that something as easy to learn as meditation can make a profound difference to people’s lives.
Meditation is a chance for you to relax, to go within and quieten your mind, to discover a deep inner peace that is underneath the ‘busy-ness’ of everyday life, where you can rest and recharge your mind and body.
In the current turbulent economic times, Meditation is being routinely recommended in the popular press as one of the ways to survive the pressure of increased uncertainty and unprecedented workloads. But this is not just a recent phenomenon, in April 2003 TIME magazine devoted an issue to the subject of meditation, with the strapline:
‘Scientists study it. Doctors recommend it. Millions of Americans
- many of whom don't even own crystals - practice it every day.
Why? Because meditation works
And in 2007, ‘How to Meditate’ was the 7th most common ‘How to...’ query typed into the Google search engine (statistic from Google Zeitgeist).
As well as the well known people listed on the right, in the Sunday Times on 19th October 2008, the comedienne Rosanne Barr was quoted, under the title ‘Meditation not medication’ as saying:
‘I'm much calmer than I used to be and that’s all to do with meditation.
I meditate three times a day. Meditation has changed my life. It brings
awareness, it decreases fear - all that kind of stuff. Since I started
meditation I haven’t needed antidepressants. But I used to need them bad
- I had to be drugged to live with my husbands, all three of them.
Now I’ve got a nice boyfriend, a kindred spirit.’
Meditation in Businesses and Schools
There is no doubt that clarity is an important part of effective decision making, and for many years business leaders and experts such as Brian Tracey, Napoleon Hill, Sir John Harvey Jones, Steven Covey and Bob Proctor (to name just a few) have all talked about the benefits of being ‘still’ or ‘quiet’ in order to find clarity, or as Roger Hamilton, founder of the hugely successful XL Foundation says, you have to “get below the noise”.
One example is Georgeanne Lamont of Lamont Associates, who has been introducing ‘stillness’ to organisations as part of programmes of cultural change since 1989 (see her book ‘The Spirited Business – Success Stories of Soul-Friendly Companies’) and counts Microsoft, Xerox and National Westminster Bank among her clients. There is also now a growing body of evidence about the benefits of meditation in the workplace to support staff who are tired, stressed and pressurised.
Click here to read about studies into meditation usage in businesses…
Finally, although meditation in mainstream education is still uncommon, there is now a growing understanding that by helping children to discover and nurture the most important relationship they will ever have (the ‘internal’ one with themselves), they are more likely to grow into adults who are able to relate to the ‘external’ world in a much more healthy way.
As well as seeing the rise of ‘Wellbeing’ classes within the education system in the United Kingdom, there have been a number of studies in the United States, including one which showed that two short meditation sessions each day helped teenage students lower their blood pressure over a four month period.
Click here to read more about meditation in schools…
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