Honored to have experienced Meditation coach, Sura, sharing her wisdom in this article.

Did you know that those who engage in a regular meditation practice have more energy and tend to look younger than their age?

Meditation can also help you reduce stress as you focus on your breathing and connect to your body. This is because when you meditate there is a physiological response that happens within your body. When you slow down your breath, it sends a message to the brain to slow down, activating the parasympathetic nervous system. This is also known as the relaxation response.

What is the Relaxation Response?

The relaxation response helps you reverse stress and move away from the fight or flight response, which keeps you on edge.

The Relaxation Response:

  • Helps to slow your body down.
  • Decreases your heart rate, blood pressure, and digestion.
  • Helps your body return to a state of homeostasis.

During the relaxation response, your body moves from a state of physiological arousal to a state of peace and calm. As part of this process, your heart rate decreases, your blood pressure lowers and your digestion slows.

The relaxation response acts as a signal telling the body, “you’re okay, you’re safe, and you can let go.” In times of chronic stress, the body is in a constant state of physiological arousal over perceived threats. Even though these threats may not be life-threatening, they can cause the release of adrenaline and cortisol, which keeps you in an agitated state. 

Constantly living in survival mode is not a healthy way to live but unfortunately, it’s the way many of us live. Stress and anxiety can also cause you to breathe much more shallow, which depletes your life force energy.

When you meditate and breathe deeply, you’re breathing at a slower, fuller pace, and your body knows that it can let go and release toxins. 

The more you meditate and relax and activate the relaxation response, the more toxins your body will release and the more your energy will flow. This allows your body to fully rest and digest.

If you spend a lot of time repressing what you truly feel, you actually cause undue stress on your body. These things need to be released and acknowledged so that you can purge them out of the cellular memory in your body. Meditation is like a beautiful catharsis. 

The Sports Car Analogy

The analogy of a sports car is a good one to use here. When you compare your body to a fine sports car, like a Maserati, you would clearly see that the car wouldn’t be able to continually run without some care. If you ran the car 100 miles a day and neglected to repair it or put gas in it, the car would eventually break down.

It’s the same with the body. When you meditate you engage the parasympathetic nervous system, which allows the body to return to homeostasis, which is a state of balance. As a result, your body is then able to self regulate through the breath, and also through your emotions and thoughts.

When you slow down your breathing, your thoughts will also tend to slow down and become still. And in that stillness, you can find peace. 

What Ages Us the Most?

The number one thing that ages the body is stress. Stress is also the number one cause of illness and disease. When you are tense, anxious or even depressed, you feel overburdened.

The responsibilities weigh you down. All of this takes a toll on the body and on your spiritual being, which can accelerate the aging process. 

One of the best things you can do to ease away stress and anxiety is to learn how to breathe and learn how to activate the relaxation response within your body, all of which you can do during meditation.

A simple meditation practice doesn’t have to take a long time either because you can start with 5 or 10 minutes a day. The key is to be consistent. Consistently practicing meditation can help you bring yourself back in and keep that energy flowing.

As you breathe and meditate, you can connect to the present moment and to your sense of self in your body. This is what meditation helps you to do. 

When you take the time to engage in a daily meditation practice:

  • You start slowing your body down.
  • You slow your heart rate, digestion and breathing down. 
  • You allow your body to rest and refresh.
  • You tap into your own inner sanctuary of peace and joy.

As a result, your mind becomes quiet and clear. When you’re able to tap into your own inner sanctuary. You can attune to that positive, abundant gracious part of you that is your true self.

Through meditation, you start to realize that toxic thoughts often drain your own energy. If you really think about it, the way we perceive life or approach life often causes us the most amount of stress. 

Meditation can help you out of that stress loop and help you reframe your thoughts.

When you can learn how to start changing your thoughts and getting rid of thoughts that no longer serve you, your heart, mind, and body will be able to tap into those higher levels of peace and joy and positive energy.

How Can You Get Started?

If you want to start a meditation practice, start with 5 or 10 minutes a day, or counting your breaths from 1-10, repeating the process as long as you want.

When you surrender to counting your breaths you let yourself relax into that experience which is a beautiful thing.

In the end, the practice of meditation has a lot of benefits from a simple practice you can begin in just 5 or 10 minutes a day.

About Sura:

Sura is a highly experienced Meditation Coach and Trainer and is passionate about helping people tap into their joy through the practice of meditation. She first discovered meditation when she was in severe pain while working on Wall Street. After receiving profound healing benefits from her sitting practice, she left New York to study meditation in Asia and has been teaching meditation ever since.

Sura currently offers online training for leadership teams and coaches. She offers a certified Meditation Coach training LIBERATE based on her approach, Flow meditation, which integrates meditation, energy cultivation, and healing. Her work can be seen on Huffington Post, Daily Om, and other major publications. Learn more about Sura and her work at SuraFlow.Org where you can receive a free meditation toolkit and begin a practice of daily calm.