Mental Skills
which Meditation Practice Helps Improve

From my personal experiences with meditation here are some “mental” skills which usually improve over time. Of course with these, like with most growth skills, it’s an up and down process. Also keep in mind that these skills combine with and feed upon each other. You are usually improving all of them simultaneously even when you don’t realize what is happening.

• Relaxing the Body
• Releasing Distracting Thoughts
• Being Here Now
• Concentrated Focus
• Mindfulness
• Other Skills

Relaxing the Body    top

Meditation is a way to calm one’s mind, to shut down, and, essentially, reboot in a way that is different and deeper than sleep.  My own early experience from Transcendental Meditation was that it can be used as a quicker picker upper when you are dead tired (or feeling sickish) and don’t have much time to recover before the next activity.

Systematically relaxing the muscles in your body, from head to toe, is one well known form of meditation. Shavasana, the Yoga corpse pose, is used to accomplish this effect.

Meditation breathing exercises can also help you relax. In fact breathing exercises are often the first techniques taught to beginners to give a feel for what meditation is. Combat breathing is even a technique the military & police use to quickly get rid of the jitters prior to combat.

By the way, you don’t necessarily have to purposefully relax when meditating. After 20 minutes you will almost always find yourself much more relaxed even if that was not your conscious objective.

Releasing Distracting Thoughts    top

Monkey mind is what meditators jokingly call the random thoughts they notice racing through their minds during meditation. Those semi-conscious thoughts were always there … meditation just makes you more aware of them.

Meditation gives you practice at releasing these thoughts rather than let them take over.  One way to do this while meditating is “to just watch the thoughts drift by like you would watch leaves on a stream slowly drift by.”  Releasing these thoughts frees up your subconscious for deeper, more restful pursuits.

I have found that after months of meditation practice the jumble of thoughts the mind tends to generate is greatly reduced.  I.e., fewer leaves float by. This extends to daily life as well; you find yourself less harassed by your monkey mind and more often experiencing an empty mind. Of course different people get different results at different rates.

Some forms of meditation (e.g., centering prayer meditation) may even dredge up repressed negative thoughts & feelings you didn’t realize existed. After several meditation sessions you typically find such junk starts getting released as well. Don’t worry too much about it; just let such thoughts pop up and drift away on their own. It’s a cleansing process.

Being Here Now    top

Learning how to “be here now” is one of the prime objectives of meditation. It is a way to temporarily escape past sorrows and future worries. It is a way to temporarily escape the incessant noise of the monkey mind and the explanations (true or not … it doesn’t matter) our minds seem determined to provide.

Meditation is about paying close attention to immediate sensations rather than to the verbal stories we are all continuously weaving with our minds. By practicing meditation we can get closer to reality and less blindly driven by our ego and judgmental selves. With increased awareness we can learn to make better, more realistic judgments and to be happier with what is right in front of us.

So, meditation is about practicing the awareness skill of being here now (here first, then now works easiest for me). One signal of success is that during deep meditation time seems to disappear; now when the timer bell rings it is a surprise rather than something for which I was expectantly waiting.  Also, as one gets more into the here and now the pain of boredom is reduced; this is another thing to look for in both meditation and in daily life.  Escapes such as TV and overeating will become less needed as your being here now skill increases.

Concentration    top

Concentration is that faculty of the mind which focuses single mindedly on one object without interruption.  In every form of meditation you practice holding your attention on one thing … perhaps a candle (yoga candle gazing meditation) or your breath (breathing meditation) or even a blank wall (Zen meditation).

Meditating is like exercising your attention muscle. Each time you bring your attention back to your focus point the attention muscle gets stronger and the habit groove of resisting distractions gets deeper. Repetition is the secret which is why many meditation instructors say the real secret is simply practice.

Increased will power and ability to resist distracting urges are beneficial in many phases of your life since both  help keep you on course towards the things that are most important to you. You drift less and accomplish more.

Mindfulness    top

Mindfulness stands back from the focus of attention and watches with a broad focus, quick to notice any change that occurs.  Concentration has the power to burn its way deep into the mind and illuminate what is there. But it does not understand what it sees. Mindfulness can examine and understand what it sees, in particular the mechanics of selfishness. (ref:  Mindfulness Vs Concentration)

Meditation is one of the best ways to become more mindful.  Practicing RAIN is another.

Other Possibly Related Skills?    top

Going to Sleep
Going to sleep more quickly is another skill it would be nice to obtain from meditation practice. However, quickly & purposefully moving from the conscious state of wanting to go to sleep to the unconscious state of being asleep is something I have not yet completely mastered.

I’ve heard of decathlon champions being able to sleep under the bleachers for 15 minutes during breaks in competition but that’s not me. So far, putting myself in a sleep provoking situation (e.g., dead tired, no outside distractions, etc.) seems to be the best way to accomplish quick sleep.

However I have found that a full, purposeful, timed meditation session can help provoke sleep when nothing else can. I don’t go to sleep during the meditation itself but find that I am more mentally relaxed and then sleep usually just happens shortly thereafter.

Getting in the Flow
Many people describe their flow experiences by using the metaphor of a water current carrying them along.  It is being in the zone … a positive, optimal, completely absorbed state which sometimes happens when an artist gets lost in her work or an athlete is performing at his best.

Flow would be another skill which would be great to have quickly & purposefully accessible. Several meditation skills seem related so it seems possible to me that practicing meditation might possibly lead to more flow in one’s life.

Delaying Gratification
Meditation may also help you learn how to increase your ability to delay gratification. The famous Stanford Marshmallow Experiment suggests this ability leads to better life outcomes.

Related Links    top

• Return to Meditation Overview
• Is Meditation Worth The Time – a very similar page on the subject.
• Meditation Page and blog Entries.
• Top of Page, Index Page or Home Page