100 Benefits of Meditation

Physiological benefits:
1- It lowers oxygen consumption.
2- It decreases respiratory rate.
3- It increases blood flow and slows the heart rate.
4- Increases exercise tolerance.
5- Leads to a deeper level of physical relaxation.
6- Good for people with high blood pressure.
7- Reduces anxiety attacks by lowering the levels of blood lactate.
8- Decreases muscle tension
9- Helps in chronic diseases like allergies, arthritis etc.
10- Reduces Pre-menstrual Syndrome symptoms.
11- Helps in post-operative healing.
12- Enhances the immune system.
13- Reduces activity of viruses and emotional distress
14- Enhances energy, strength and vigour.
15- Helps with weight loss
16- Reduction of free radicals, less tissue damage
17- Higher skin resistance
18- Drop in cholesterol levels, lowers risk of cardiovascular disease.
19- Improved flow of air to the lungs resulting in easier breathing.
20- Decreases the aging process.
21- Higher levels of DHEAS (Dehydroepiandrosterone)
22- prevented, slowed or controlled pain of chronic diseases
23- Makes you sweat less
24- Cure headaches & migraines
25- Greater Orderliness of Brain Functioning
26- Reduced Need for Medical Care
27- Less energy wasted
28- More inclined to sports, activities
29- Significant relief from asthma
30- improved performance in athletic events
31- Normalizes to your ideal weight
32- harmonizes our endocrine system
33- relaxes our nervous system
34- produce lasting beneficial changes in brain electrical activity
35- Cure infertility (the stresses of infertility can interfere with the release of hormones that regulate ovulation).

Psychological benefits:
36- Builds self-confidence.
37- Increases serotonin level, influences mood and behaviour.
38- Resolve phobias & fears
39- Helps control own thoughts
40- Helps with focus & concentration
41- Increase creativity
42- Increased brain wave coherence.
43- Improved learning ability and memory.
44- Increased feelings of vitality and rejuvenation.
45- Increased emotional stability.
46- improved relationships
47- Mind ages at slower rate
48- Easier to remove bad habits
49- Develops intuition
50- Increased Productivity
51- Improved relations at home & at work
52- Able to see the larger picture in a given situation
53- Helps ignore petty issues
54- Increased ability to solve complex problems
55- Purifies your character
56- Develop will power
57- greater communication between the two brain hemispheres
58- react more quickly and more effectively to a stressful event.
59- increases one’s perceptual ability and motor performance
60- higher intelligence growth rate
61- Increased job satisfaction
62- increase in the capacity for intimate contact with loved ones
63- decrease in potential mental illness
64- Better, more sociable behaviour
65- Less aggressiveness
66- Helps in quitting smoking, alcohol addiction
67- Reduces need and dependency on drugs, pills & pharmaceuticals
68- Need less sleep to recover from sleep deprivation
69- Require less time to fall asleep, helps cure insomnia
70- Increases sense of responsibility
71- Reduces road rage
72- Decrease in restless thinking
73- Decreased tendency to worry
74- Increases listening skills and empathy
75- Helps make more accurate judgements
76- Greater tolerance
77- Gives composure to act in considered & constructive ways
78- Grows a stable, more balanced personality
79- Develops emotional maturity

Spiritual benefits:
80- Helps keep things in perspective
81- Provides peace of mind, happiness
82- Helps you discover your purpose
83- Increased self-actualization.
84- Increased compassion
85- Growing wisdom
86- Deeper understanding of yourself and others
87- Brings body, mind, spirit in harmony
88- Deeper Level of spiritual relaxation
89- Increased acceptance of oneself
90- helps learn forgiveness
91- Changes attitude toward life
92- Creates a deeper relationship with your God
93- Attain enlightenment
94- greater inner-directedness
95- Helps living in the present moment
96- Creates a widening, deepening capacity for love
97- Discovery of the power and consciousness beyond the ego
98- Experience an inner sense of “Assurance or Knowingness”
99- Experience a sense of “Oneness”
100- Increases the synchronicity in your life

Meditation is also completely FREE! It requires no special equipment, and is not complicated to learn. It can be practiced anywhere, at any given moment, and it is not time consuming (15-20 min. per day is good). Best of all, meditation has NO negative side effects. Bottom line, there is nothing but positive to be gained from it! With such a huge list of benefits, the question you should ask yourself is, “why am I not meditating yet?”

Make sure you meditate, there are quite simply too many positives to just ignore it.

http://www.brandongilbert.info/2009/01/26/100-benefits-of-meditation/

We Are Each Responsible for the Thoughts We Think. . .

Abraham-Hicks on the Power of Thoughts

"When you are in alignment with who-you-really-are, you cannot help but uplift those with whom you come into contact. Your value to those around you hinges upon only one thing: your personal alignment with Source. And the only thing you have to give to another is an example of that alignment—which they may observe, then desire, and then work to achieve—but you cannot give it to them. Everyone is responsible for the thoughts they think and the things that they choose as their objects of attention."

"You don't have to worry about what their vibration is if your vibration is one of connection. Because if your vibration is one of connection -- you're going to dominate the vibration. This is the way you learn your relationships. The thing that most people do not understand, is that you get to control the way you feel, because you get to choose the thoughts you think. Most people think that they only have the option of responding to the circumstances that surround them. And that's what makes them attempt the impossible, which is to control the circumstances around them, which only feeds their feeling of frustration and vulnerability, because it doesn't take very much life experience to discover you can't control all of those circumstances. But you can control your vibration. And when you control your vibration, you've controlled everything that has anything to do with you."

"You are on the leading edge of thought, taking thought beyond that which it has been before. Who cares what thoughts have led up to this. You're standing in the fresh now, and many of the thoughts that you vehemently oppose are the very thoughts that have given you the desire that has attracted the clarity of where you now stand. No matter how awful you think they might be, all were of value in the evolution forward. Every one of them."

"What 'moving thought forward' is, is about being a nucleus that attracts different components of thought so that when they actualize around you -- it is different than it has ever been before! 'As I stand in my focused, human, leading-edge experience, and I choose this combination of thoughts and feelings, I am offering a signal that has never been offered before. And so, the Universe must uniquely yield to me, which causes me to offer a vibration that maybe someone somewhere else is matching. If they are, they will certainly come into my experience for the time that we are matching it.' That is the way you affect the world. Most think in terms of thought affecting the world: You think about transmitting outward: 'I'm going to affect the world from my outgoing signal.' That isn't the way it works. You affect the world by achieving the vibration that brings the signals to you. You create a nucleus that Universe has to respond around. That is how you are the creator."

All Is Well

http://www.abraham-hicks.com/lawofattractionsource/index.php

My Personal Development for 2009

I am welcoming the new year by working on some personal development - mental and physical. I want to share my experiences, not only for my readers, but also so that I can examine my progress.


Juice Feasting
To start the New Year in great health, I am juice feasting. I don't usually set a specific time frame in which to do this. Rather, I listen to my body and I'm finished when I'm finished. I have experienced a lot of physical changes over the last 1-2 years, and every so often, the time comes for me to let my body rest by not feeding it anything more it has to digest. By juicing, I am still getting all of the nutrients I need without the fiber to digest and breakdown. I have been feeling slightly tired and run down lately - most likely a result of my desire to hibernate all winter and the stress of finishing school and running my own business.

I feel great so far. I had a large salad and an apple right before midnight last night and have not eaten since. I had some citrus juice this morning made of grapefruit, orange, lemon, and lime. I have also had some Holy Basil tea. I plan on having a large green juice for dinner with celery, cucumber, parsley, cilantro, and mint. Most likely, more tea tonight too.

Creative Expression
I love expressing myself creatively, whether painting, writing, or making delicous and original raw food. Building my raw food business brought me back in touch with my creative self. It helped me to realize that I am creating in everything I do, and that art is not limited to one agreed upon definition. My food is my art, as is my love of sharing health and wellness.

My goal for this year is to express myself creatively in a myraid of ways. I love to write, which is a verbal expression of myself. I love to paint, which is a visual expression of myself. I love to share yoga, which is a physical and spiritual expression of myself. And, I love to make raw food and help people find their way back to health and happiness, which is an expression of my love. Through these acts, and many more, I hope to be creating most of the day and night, as I sleep.

I plan to paint everyday, if only for a little while. Painting helps me to focus my creativity, and calms my mind. It is as if I go into a trance and am allowing this expression of beauty to flow through me. For me, painting has similar emotional effects as seated meditation.

Meditation
I plan to meditate everyday, even if only for a short period of time. I meditate quite often, most days in fact, but usually only for a short time. Even ten minutes gives me a sense of calm and wellbeing. Often, my mind is awhirl, thoughts of everything I need to get done in the next week and ideas for new recipes and paintings fight for my attention.

This morning as soon as I woke up, I meditated for maybe fifteen minutes. I would have gone longer, but was very excited to begin juicing and just could not clear my head. Oh well, this is why I will practice seated meditation everyday.

Goal Setting
I have always been a goal setter. I find that things I put into writing often happen much faster than things which I do not put into writing. All of the leaders in the field of personal development talk about the importance of goal setting and writing things down. By writing something, it is as if you are affirming it, rather than allowing to to exist only as a fleeting thought.

I have a Vision Book, in which I write goals and dreams, paste pictures of places I want to visit, and write mantras and inspirational quotes. For a while, I was writing in this book daily, and I would love to get back into that habit. I accomplish more if I write out clear goals and ideas, and then record the steps necessary reach each one.

Gardening
My resolution for this year is to eat as much LOCAL organic produce as possible. This means that in addition to frequenting farmers markets every week, I am going to have to plant quite a large garden this year. I had only a few heirloom tomato plants last year, but they produced enough fruit that I had garden fresh tomatoes all summer long. I also had pepper plants which produced so much that I am still eating dried cayennes and jalepenos in January! I enjoyed gardening so immensely that I plan to at least triple the size of my garden this year.

Gardening is yet form of creation, except rather than working alone, one works harmoniously with Mother Nature to produce new life and nourishment. I feel more at peace when interacting with nature. Gardening is a way of helping the Earth do what she was meant to do - give life. By caring for seedlings which later become fruiting plants, we are giving love, and then receiving love in the form of fruits and flowers, vegetables, and more seeds.

I have already begun planning my spring garden. I am carefully choosing the heirloom variety seeds which I will plant with love and intention. I am also designing a small greenhouse to go up as soon as possible so that my seedlings will be ready to plant at the first possible date.


I will continue to post on my progress in all of these areas in the days and weeks to come.