Five Superpowers You Can Harness Through Meditation
Meditation imbues practitioners with superpowers. If you want to change gracefully, elevate through joy, access divine flow and cultivate health, then meditation may be your perfect prescription. Meditation actually changes your brain: add a meditation practice to your daily routine and cultivate the following powers.
1. Power of Manifestation
According to Joe Dispenza in Your Brain on Meditation, “if you want peace in the world… you have to demonstrate peace everywhere in your life.” Humans have an average of 60,000-70,000 thoughts per day: Dispenza concludes that, because most of those thoughts are the same, and thoughts precede words, action, and choice, people end up stuck. The subjective mind produces an objective effect. Meditation offers an opportunity to change your life, from the source – your thoughts – and manifest your dreams.
2. Power of Joy
Change in the world and life is inevitable: you can experience a change in a state of suffering or state of joy. In this sense, joy refers to a state of bliss, calm, and connection to the divine. A belief in divine intelligence. Meditation provides an opportunity to choose joy, not in spite of but in union with what the outside world offers. Through meditation, you can move from a survival consciousness to mindfulness. According to Dispenza, “you don’t need the cause-and-effect model to send gratitude… your body does not know the difference.” In other words, you don’t need something material or external to experience joy; a perpetual state of gratitude is enough.
3. Power of Flow
The power of flow refers to an ability to access divine intelligence. This may appear as an intense concentration: When you embark on a project or are enraptured by a book, the flow state is when hours fly by, and you forget to eat or drink or check your phone. Meditation can help you access this state, which is closely linked to creativity and ideation. A San Francisco school extended the school day by 30 minutes for meditation, which resulted in better academic performance and a 75 percent decrease in suspensions. The students also felt “more conscious of their actions, calmer and less angry.” Access to the divine through flow has far-reaching potential for the future of humanity.
4. Power of Wisdom
In a study published in the Journal of Psychological Science, a meditation course “improved GRE reading-comprehension scores and working memory capacity while simultaneously reducing the occurrence of distracting thoughts.” Meditation is an effective technique for improving cognitive function. Wisdom is deeper than cognitive function, however. Dispenza says wisdom is “memory without the emotional charge.” Trauma and stress, and the resulting patterns of remembrance, often trigger deep insecurities. Meditation offers a path to watching the ebbs and flows of memory without the knee-jerk emotional responses. Essentially, meditation allows movement forward through an acceptance of the past. Time spent envisioning a positive future versus revisiting the past is time better spent. Consider if your thoughts reflect your future self, your dream life.
5. Power of Health
Without your health, you have nothing, as the adage goes. The stress of modern living and environmental issues often lead to lifelong conditions and ailments. The National Center for Complementary and Integrated Health states that meditation reduces the severity of and/or aids the following: pain, high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, anxiety, depression and insomnia, and smoking cessation. A study published in the Journal of General Hospital Psychiatry, concluded that meditation “can have long-term beneficial effects in the treatment of people diagnosed with anxiety disorders.” Focus, through meditation, on health, feeling well leads to drastic improvements in existing conditions and may help with prevention. Does deductive reasoning beg the question, if our thoughts make us sick, can our thoughts also make us well?
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10 Fun Facts About Breathing & the Respiratory System
Our ability to breathe is fascinating, as it’s one of the only systems in our body that can be controlled both voluntarily, through the central nervous system, and more often involuntarily, through the autonomic nervous system. This overlap between the two systems is the reason why focused, intentional breathing methods through yoga and meditation are able to affect other involuntary muscles like the heart.
Our breath is what gives us life and without it, the human body cannot exist. But is it possible to better your life by paying more attention to how you breathe?
While breathing is so commonplace to our existence, proper breathing techniques and awareness of breath can have dramatic implications on our health. Having knowledge of specific breathing techniques can lower stress, help you sleep, help your mind function more acutely, and even curb food cravings.
When we breathe, the average adult draws in about 13 pints of air into the lungs every minute. From the lungs, that oxygen is then transferred from the air sacs in our lungs throughout the body via red blood cells to the blood vessels that distribute it to nearly every system. Meanwhile, waste gases, like CO2, are exchanged and filtered out.
For the average person with good lung health, the amount of oxygen in the blood, or the arterial blood gas (ABG) oxygen level, should be somewhere between 95-100 percent oxygen.
