The research and practice of meditation is becoming more widespread. Almost daily I discover new studies citing the vast benefits of this ancient practice. Meditation has been associated with alternative medicine and the holistic lifestyle movement. Therefore, the title of this article may seem confusing. After all, isn’t everything holistic meditation?
If by “holistic” you mean “a natural process that leads to greater health and well-being,” then yes, all meditation is holistic. Meditation activates your body’s natural relaxation response, allowing you to release tension and stress. This puts your body into recovery and repair mode, which is beneficial to your immune system, digestive system, and virtually every physiological process in your body.
While all meditations can be holistic in a very general sense, there is a wide range of meditation styles. In fact, as meditation becomes more widespread, it becomes even more difficult to sift through the different methods to find the one that works best for you. After more than 25 years of study, teaching, and practice, I have come to recognize four dimensions activated by various meditation techniques: body, heart, mind, and spirit.
Many meditation styles emphasize only one or two of these dimensions. In my quest to discover the most comprehensive approach, I look for practices that address these four dimensions. Methods that emphasize all four dimensions I call “holistic.”
Let’s explore how meditation works within each of these dimensions:
1.Body
Most meditation methods begin with cues to relax the body and align the posture. This is essential. Your body is the vehicle for your life’s journey and the record of your life experiences. Stresses and traumas are stored in your cells until you resolve or release them. Meditation is one way to do this.
In meditation, you combine cues for active relaxation with upright posture and deep breathing to release layers of tension stored in your body. Having an upright posture also stimulates the reticular formation in the brainstem, leading to alert awareness and attentive attention. Some meditations also use “inner body” awareness to relax the body and focus attention. This is a powerful technique that leads to the second dimension.
2.Heart
By “heart” I mean your emotions and your physical heart, which is a major emotional processing center. Some meditation systems encourage you to simply acknowledge and let go of feelings as they arise. While this is essential in your meditation practice, it is also important to actively engage in a positive emotional attitude. In fact, you can practice feeling positive emotion through the “inner smile”, which is widely used in qigong or Core Energy Meditation™. You may also be familiar with activating positive feelings in your heart with the HeartMath™ system.
Feeling appreciation, gratitude, love, and trust in your heart has a powerful positive effect on your body and brain chemistry. These feelings also activate the limbic system or emotional brain, calming your feelings and modeling positive emotions in your neural networks.
3. Mind
Most meditation systems emphasize the mind. By mentally concentrating on one thing, such as your breath, or contemplating a thought, such as “impermanence,” you develop your powers of concentration while stilling and clearing your mind. Visualization is another particularly powerful way to focus your attention and develop your mental powers. Focusing your attention in this way activates your prefrontal cortex, your mental command center.
In meditation you also discover that you are not the thoughts you are thinking. You have thoughts, but you are not the thoughts you have. This frees you from obsessing over your thoughts. Instead, you take the perspective of an observer who witnesses the thoughts as they float by.
4.Spirit
The spirit can be an amorphous concept. To keep things simple and universal, let’s define “spirit” as that part of you that is an expression of the Universal Life Force. A spiritual practice then enhances your experience of the Universal Life Force and your feelings of union with Life Itself.
As your body relaxes and aligns, your emotions settle and shift to the positive, and your mind quiets and clears, connecting with who you are on an essential level. Some would say that you connect with the Source of your being. From a spiritual perspective, you might see this as the ultimate purpose of meditation: to experience yourself as part of the One Life we all share.
Meditation practices that include these four dimensions I call “holistic meditation.” In my experience, holistic meditation is the most powerful method of personal development and spiritual growth available.
For more information on holistic meditation, follow the link in the resource box below.
Enjoy your practice!