Costco Connection - July 2012

health for your Taking a meditation vacation Om There’s no place like

By Matthew Robb

PUSHED AND PULLED from every direction, millions of Americans identify stress as a major health concern. While Type A personalities bulldoze through stress with defiant pride, experts agree: Ignore the warning sirens long enough and stress overload can rampage through body, mind and spirit like an F5 tornado.

Research clearly links chronic stress to a host of conditions: anxiety, insomnia, depression, anger, hypertension, infertility, diabetes, accelerated aging, heart disease and more. Severe or chronic stress also can pack on unwanted belly fat, make it hard to bounce back from illness and shift a healthy sex drive into park.

Meditation, by contrast, acts as a mini-vacation, rebalancing an inner world turned upside down. Once you gain proficiency in this 3,500-year-old practice, you can enter a calming state at will. In minutes, racing thoughts coast to a welcome rest, knotted muscles unclench and you start to feel relaxed—even serene.

In recent years, university researchers and brain imaging scientists have demonstrated that meditation enhances the ability to focus and maintain attention, quickly recall and process information, generate creative ideas and best solutions, and prioritize and manage goals. In 2011, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center reported that meditation reduces chronic pain better than morphine or other pain-relieving drugs.

If anything about meditation is difficult, it’s escorting newcomers past all those Age of Aquarius, pass-the-granola stereotypes, (Hay House, 2012).

“Meditation is not about changing
your religion, adopting an extreme diet
or sitting funny. It’s very mainstream
and easy to do,” she says. “Learning it
does take practice, but nothing could
be easier or more natural.”
Because our multitasking, rapid-fire
world rarely requires our brains to focus
intently for long periods of time, she notes,
practitioners of meditation achieve and main-
tain a restful state “by focusing on something
heard, something seen or something felt.”

Matthew Robb, an avid practitioner of meditation, writes about health issues for magazines and newspapers around the nation. He lives in suburban Washington, D.C.

Five fundamentals for fulfilling meditation

DON’T GET HUNG up on finding the ultimate time and place to meditate. “I meditate in all sorts of places—church, doctors’ offices, sometimes even sitting in my car in a parking lot,” says meditation instructor Sarah McLean, a Costco member since 2005.

Meditation doesn’t have hard rules, but do consider McLean’s guidelines:

1. Accept distractions as normal. “Simply refocus your attention back to a mantra, candle or feeling of your breath,” she says.

2. Be kind to yourself. If your mind wanders, don’t judge harshly. Accept and refocus.

3. Start with a beginner’s mind. Be open to whatever happens next.

4. Don’t give up. If you set 10 minutes as your goal, commit to it.

5. Don’t try too hard. “Meditation is as gentle and natural as sleep, creativity and inspiration,” she says. “None of these things can be forced.”—MR