Meditation for Stress Reduction

Author: Anmol Mehta

The biggest killer on the planet today is stress. It's not cancer, heart attacks, AIDS, it's stress. Stress suppresses the body’s natural immune system and thus, diminishes it's ability to fight diseases and stay healthy. Thus, it is the underlying cause for many of the health issues we suffer from today. Cure stress and you are well on your way to living a happy, healthy and long life. What is the best cure for stress? Meditation.

Today’s high pressure and highly competitive environment is the culprit for creating this atmosphere of stress, which is afflicting us all. From grade school onwards, right through college and career, the mantra is to get to the top. Everyone seems to be fighting to be king of the hill, and in this immature battle with each other, they are falling victim to stress. It is time to turn our attention now to this silent killer and neutralize it with the elixir of meditation.

Meditation is the right way to defeat stress for two reasons. First is that it transforms us into deep, peaceful beings who are much more capable of handling stressful situations. Second, the state of mind induced by meditation is optimal for self-healing to occur and thus, reverse the damage that stress has caused our bodies. Let us go into each of these two reasons in a little more detail now.

Meditation is the art of living in the moment. It teaches us how to disengage from endless worrying and anxiety causing thoughts and instead, cherish and live each moment fully and completely. The more we practice this art of living in the moment, the more we find ourselves in peace with our lives. We drop our constant habits of chewing over the past and our constant worry of how the future will be. This shift in how we approach our lives drastically reduces the amount of self inflicted stress we have to deal with.

In addition to the decrease in thought induced stress, meditation also teaches us how to remain calm in the face of storms. As we practice our meditation we are actually learning to not run away from the moment. We are learning to absorb the difficulty that the moment presents us with in a controlled environment. This then translates into dealing calmly with the difficulties that life throws at us in our day to day living.

Essentially, stress is mostly the result of life not being exactly the way we want it to be, and with meditation we start of accept life exactly as it is, and so drop the part of us that wants it to be different. When we drop this part which wants things to be like this or like that, we drop the stress associated with constant seeking as well.

As we also indicated, meditation helps us heal the damage that stress has already caused us. This is because meditation produces a state of mind which can be called relaxed awareness. Relaxed awareness is the state most conducive for self healing to take place. Mountains of medical research has recently emerged about the health benefits of a positive and relaxed mind, and meditation regularly creates this wonderful state to thus promote self-healing.

So the prescription is simple ?" meditate if you want to be healed and stay healthy. The silent killer is stress, but to kill stress, sit silently.

About the author
Anmol Mehta is a Yoga & Meditation expert. For Free Online Yoga & Meditation Classes visit, Free Online Guided Meditation Techniques or Chakra Kundalini Yoga Blog.