My answer to the question “Why meditate?” is borrowed from Rick Hanson, Ph.D.’s book Buddha’s Brain, and is grounded in his self-caring idea of “being on our own side”:

  1. You are a human being like any other – and just as deserving of happiness, love and wisdom.
  2. Nurturing your own development isn’t selfish. It’s actually a great gift to other people.

One key benefit of meditating implied here is a higher level of happiness, and indeed, a study by two Harvard psychologists bears this out.  They found that we spend almost 50% of our waking hours thinking about something other than what we’re doing, and that this “mind-wandering” mostly makes us unhappy.  So its absence is “an excellent predictor of people’s happiness.”  Given that meditation is shown to reduce the level of mind-wandering, one can conclude that it can be, in fact, an antidote to unhappiness as well.

For me, not only does my mind frequently wander from thought to thought, when it fixates on a particular thought, “overthinking” can kick in which too often leads into a painful cycle of dwelling negatively on the past or worrying unnecessarily about the future.  And so, one of the things that keeps me meditating regularly is its ability to lessen my mind-wandering and thereby overthinking, leading to an increased level of happiness.

In addition to this, I have benefited in many other ways, a number of which you can check out in the next post if you like.  And I invite you to share here what benefits you may have experienced through practicing meditation, or any negative impacts for that matter.  There is no predictable set of outcomes any one person might see as the actual results of a meditation practice can only be known by experiencing them for yourself.

And feel free to head to our About, Steps or Offerings pages to learn more about Mind on Breath and what we have to offer.  We look forward to the possibility of practicing with you!