Meditating For Success

Dear lovely people,

In my quest for success, I read lots of books and articles and so often get thinking on how to improve myself. Most of what I come up with is what I share with you through these lectures (articles)

So let me talk about Meditation – yes you read it right meditation. Did you know that meditation can improve how your brain functions? Of course a 2012 study showed a brain process called gyrification happening more in people who meditate. Gyrification is the “folding” of the cerebral cortex as a result of growth, which in turn may allow the brain to process information faster. Scientists suspect that gyrification is responsible for making the brain better at processing information, making decisions, forming memories, and improving attention. If it’s true that meditation makes your brain work better, then it becomes easier for you to form grand conceptions. The process of conceiving ideas, playing with them within and putting them on paper geos with some brain work you get the point.

Meditation makes it easier for you to get in touch with yourself. The busyness of modern life, along with the perpetual onslaught of media that tells us how we ought to look, feel, and behave, can leave us feeling detached form ourselves. It can be difficult to connect with our own values and emotions. We see standards put into place, and we want to meet those standards, so we pretend to be a certain way even when, perhaps, we are not. Meditation through mindfulness helps us to see our authentic selves and when you can see your authentic self, you are in the position to know what exactly you want out of life and how to achieve it.

Working hard for your own success is not enough, you are bound to make mistakes and again it’s not the mistakes you make that matter but what you learn from them. Meditation can help you learn and retain what you learn. One study showed that mindfulness training resulted in “improved accuracy on the…higher working memory capacity.” The researchers concluded that “the improvement could be explained, at least in part, by reduced mind wandering during the task.”

This make me strongly think that meditation can increase your performance. A study done in 2012 set participants up in a real-world multitasking situation. They had to do several activities that required various forms of input in a typical office setting. And they had to complete them all within 20 minutes. Some of the participants received mindfulness training, and some didn’t… and then, they tested them all again. “The only participants to show improvement,” reported the researchers, “were those who had received the mindfulness training.”

Handling high-stress, high-performance situations like a pro could certainly be a handy skill to have, and it’s one that meditation can help you cultivate. A huge part of succeeding in life is being able to multitask, to handle multivariate stress situations and maintaining high-performance most of the times. You can den see how central meditation is to your quest for success.

It’s been said that 'practice makes perfect'. This sounds like some Old Testament truth needing to be complimented by a New Testament truth such as ‘meditation is the key to success”. People who rise to the top have ‘highly-integrated’ brains finely-tuned for creativity.