For most people, meditating is practiced alone, while quietly drawing your awareness inward. However, when building a regular meditation practice, it helps to have the support of a community. If you are new to meditation, you may wonder if you’re succeeding at it. Having a group setting for meditation can help you stay committed, offer comfort, and the resources of more experienced meditators. While most meditation is a solitary event, imagine what might happen if you expanded your practice to meditating within a group setting.
Mallika Chopra talks about her experience with group meditation in this article for Huffington Post. According to Chopra, although meditation is traditionally about self exploration, but she says practicing meditation in a group allows her to feel more connected. Studies show group meditation can have profound and far reaching effects on the general population.
While meditation is fundamentally about self-exploration, the coherence from meditating with others makes it personally and socially more powerful. While some are skeptical, there have been numerous studies that have shown that a large group of people meditating together has a measurable effect on the greater population.
For me personally, meditating with others helps me feel more connected. The experience of knowing that silence I experience in my meditation is the same silence that the person sitting next to me is tapping into is quite moving.
She continues by writing that group meditation lets us come together with shared intentions for change. There is power in numbers, she explains, and there is no power like a group of people who are tuned to the same frequency of peace, compassion and joy.
