Are Health and Happiness the Only 2 Reasons to Meditate?

By Seamus Anthony

By Seamus Anthony

I enjoy meditating. Personally I wonder what would have become of my life if I hadn’t discovered it at the time I did.

meditating

Recently I have decided to put my own personal meditation techniques down into a more general eBook about meditation (which is finished and coming out shortly).

A meditation book, that is, more general than Psychedelic Meditation, which sells quite nicely and in fact contains meditation instructions which will suffice anybody, but is if course angled at the “get high without drugs” niche.

Admittedly, using meditation to get high is a pretty obscure reason to practice such a noble art, and as I was doing some research to assist with the writing of the book I noted (not for the first time) some of the many reasons people meditate. From what I could tell, the two main reasons can be loosely categorized as:

  1. Health
  2. Happiness

And with good reason; meditation is well and truly proven to be excellent at improving your health and helping you to feel happier. I myself have more than once used meditation to help me to focus become healthier when I have been a slack little fatty and to fight off depression when it came a knockin’, it’s foul stinkin’ breath comin’ in under my door.

(Hey a bit of poetry there, cool!)

Now – health and happiness are two fine over-arching categories for the reasons people meditate, but they are not very specific. I want to know in closer detail, why people “sit and do nothing”.

Here are some of my guesses, maybe you have some more, if so please add them to the comments section:

Reasons To Meditate

• Mental Clarity
• Improves Physiological Health
• Facilitates Healing
• Decreased (effects of) Stress and Anxiety
• Increased Happiness and General Feelings of Well-Being
• Lowers High Blood Pressure
• Increases Energy and Vigor
• Increased Creativity
• Increased Ability to Focus
• Supports efficient post-operative recovery
• Increases serotonin production, which affects your mood (low-levels can cause depression)
• Helpful for those suffering from insomnia
• Helps Eliminate Headaches
• Can Help You Overcome Addictions
• Can bring on blissful “Cosmic High” type experiences
• Helps manage symptoms of Pre-Menstrual Syndrome
• Greater Self-Knowledge
• Can help you identify your life purpose or ‘calling’
• Sharper Intuition
• Spiritual insight and enlightenment

Photo by Manaki5

Hi, I'm Seamus Anthony. I am an author, artist and musician from Australia. Here at Rebel Zen, I document my journey as an creative artist and human and in doing so, hopefully help you in your own progress through your life of creativity. Go get your free E-book by me: "Taming The Monkey Mind".