What are the benefits of meditation? In this video, Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us how, with meditation, you can transform your life. Meditation is profoundly healing. How? In more ways than we ever thought possible.
The benefits of meditation effect all organ systems within the body, as he states in this video:
We’re beginning to understand that…including the immune system and how the brain functions under stress and difficult situations, how we regulate emotions and so forth, (that) the brain, being an organ of experience, is actually continually changing its shape. This is the discover of neuroplasticity.
So how we decide to live our lives, and in essence, how we decide to keep our minds, actually changes not just our ideas and our opinions and how caught we get in them, but actually changes our relationship to thought. And then when we look at the structure of the brain, not only is the brain functioning differently, but the actual structure of the brain – what some people call the real estate of the brain – is being recruited into greater use in compassion, equanimity, clarity and wisdom. You can see that in different regions of the brain that actually become thicker.
Jon goes on a refer to meditation as a way to tune our bodies, much like you would tune an instrument, the body and mind being our instruments. So the greatest benefit of meditation is the benefit of enabling us to fine tune and control the systems that run our lives.
