Our minds and our bodies are connected. If we’re unhappy for a long time, our bodies become weaker and more susceptible to sickness. Similarly, when we’re physically run down, it badly affects our minds.
If you have a healthy, peaceful mind, your perception of the world reflects that. You make well-informed decisions and can appreciate the goodness in your life and the lives of those around you. Meditation leads to a peaceful, healthy mind. It is something anyone can do, any moment, any time. To see what meditation can do for you, you need to try it. Don’t imagine that you can’t!
Mind and body are very different, but they surely affect each other. We’re well conscious of how important it is to take care of our bodies—we feel and look better—but it’s easy to forget that taking care of our minds is also very important.
With the help of meditation, we can benefit our overall health by training in releasing negative thoughts and inspiring more positive thinking. This will reduce stress and anxiety and give us a clearer mind. A clear mind leads to good judgment so that we make better decisions and fewer mistakes. With better decision-making, we have fewer doubts, and this clearly impacts our overall well-being.
Well-being is an inherent quality of mind, but the way we look at things clearly affects our whole physical and mental environment. When we’re engrossed in distractions, the innate well-being of the mind gets lost or restricted. We need to make an effort to find the goodness and well-being that are there already. For us, this effort is meditation. Meditation gives the mind space to identify just how much knowledge is already there. And when there is clearness in mind, meditation also helps develop a healthy body.
The mind has the aptitude to know things. That is how the mind is clear: something that is aware and can know an object. But our minds don’t work well when they’re disturbed. Being confused by overlying thoughts and emotions is like asking our minds to “do this, but do something new first, but before that, please think about this.” Our minds get exasperated and cannot focus. When we meditate, we focus on one thing at a time, and our minds become stress-free. Our minds need space and time if they’re going to function as well as they can.
Whatsoever we do – whether we are thinking, acting, or speaking– brings either harm or benefit to ourselves and others.
Among speaking, thinking, and acting, the most important thing is what we think. If we take proper care of mind and thoughts, our physical and verbal actions will follow. When we meditate, we’re working with the mind, putting effort into making the mind calm and clear. We’re making the mind more attentive so that when there’s a problem, we won’t be as badly affected or react in such obstructive ways. Naturally, we’ll always have feelings, but when the mind is distressed, even small problems feel more enlarged and unworkable than when we remain calm. From that small disturbance, our minds create all kinds of bigger problems. At first, we’re just uncomfortable with something, then that uneasiness leads to seeing things negatively and situations can begin to feel harmful. Thinking a situation is worse than it is, we may become nervous, which then affects our judgment and actions.
It’s already a great help if we can avoid making problems that already exist even worse, but it’s the opposite of what generally happens. By taking care of the mind with meditation, we protect it. In the same way, our actions and speech are also protected, preventing us from saying or doing things we may guilt. This is how we find ourselves in a much better position to help ourselves and others.
We can encourage ourselves to practice by remembering that unhappiness and negative emotions are contagious – by their nature, they tend to hurt others. As the saying goes, unhappiness loves the company. It is even more vital to remind ourselves that good feelings and intentions are also contagious in just the same way. Just think of others. Even a small sign of kindness has a ripple effect. If you smile at somebody, they’re gratified and smile back at you.
Helping others starts with good intentions and taking care of our minds. And taking good care of our minds starts with meditation.