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?
About the Author
Join the Internal Selfie Revolution
Have you joined the selfie revolution? Since Robert Cornelius took the first selfie in 1839, humans have been fascinated, if not obsessed, with snapping images of themselves. People now take selfies for many reasons, such as telling a story and capturing memories.
Did you know that people have been taking internal selfies since time immemorial, well at least several thousand BCE? It’s called meditation! It’s nothing mysterious or fancy. All you have to do is turn your camera inward and snap a picture of your current state of mind: What do you see?
Some early forms of meditative introspection included ritual dance, reciting mantra, and sitting crossed-legged under a Bodhi tree. Today, the meditation movement has captured the world’s attention. We are learning to turn our minds inward everywhere from the gym, yoga and tai chi class, the office and at our desks, in the classroom, and the boardroom.
Ready to begin your own mindfulness journey? It’s easy. Get your camera and join the Internal Selfie Revolution! Here’s how to start your practice today.
The Psychology of the Selfie
Why do we retake our image multiple times in order to get it just right before hitting send? On a superficial level, a selfie is casual, easy way to communicate a snapshot of yourself in-the-moment. It may be used as verification or to document change. However, a selfie also give us valuable information. From a selfie we can assess our:
- Appearance
- Thoughts
- Emotions
- Feelings
How to Take an Internal Selfie: The Basics
Now try turning your camera inside. Take a peek into your own brain. Let your Internal Selfie develop into an image or sensation – it might have a distinct shape, specific texture, or even a splash of color. Examine your internal snapshot as it manifests: try not to judge, reject, embrace or explain it. Just look at it directly and be curious!
