All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
-Blaise Pascal
When you wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is probably check out your phone to keep up with emails or other social networks and media apps for new content. When you bought the phone, you actually bought a boredom-stopping device. However, just like any other organism or machine, our body and mind need rest to recover, repair and restart the system.
The best way to recover our mind is, of course, to sleep. The second best thing is meditation.
Meditation is really simple, because basically the only requirement is to do nothing. But it looks like doing nothing is the hardest thing to do today, in our busy day-to-day life activities. This shows us how deep our subconscious wiring is and how hard it is to change our habits.
If just sitting for 5 or 10 minutes per day is a hard thing to do, how could we even comprehend starting more challenging life projects and life-changing habits such as learning a career-changing skill or starting a business?
For men, meditation can serve as a starting point, focus zone and a place to ground themselves. As modern men, we are under more stress than ever, so meditation should be part of every man’s daily routine.
Below, we’re bringing you 7 great reasons to meditate as a man:
1. It’s good for your overall health
The two most important assets in our life are health and time.
We can’t buy time and it’s really hard to go back on track once our health and well-being start to decline. There are studies showing how meditation, in the long run, will help you improve your concentration, prevent mental health decline, improve your emotional wellbeing and even make you smarter.
2. It reduces stress
If you’re following online blogs and magazines related to healthy lifestyle, you will find that leading experts say that a majority of illnesses stem from stress. Stress is affecting every organ in your body in one way or another and it’s really important to lower down stress levels.
As modern humans, this is easier said than done. Nowadays, it’s impossible to avoid stressful situations, environments and hitting deadlines in your life, but meditation will teach you how to perceive them in a different light and greet them with positivity and readiness.
3. You will make better and smarter decisions
If you just wake up and start your day immediately without any plan, just start off on your inner subconscious clock, you probably won’t accomplish anything worthwhile that day.
In the long run, this can pile up and lead to a totally unproductive lifestyle, which might lead to disappointments and depression.
Meditation will help you sort out your life, sort out your daily habits in order to become more productive and to resolve important issues first by setting some short and long-term goals in your life.
“For many people it sounds silly, but daily meditation actually helped me get my life sorted out. Just a year ago, even I wouldn’t believe that something so simple can make such a huge difference. But here I am, healthy, happy, in love and successful – and the only common denominator is meditation”, says Joseph Hunter, a writer and blogger.”
4. Everybody needs therapy
…and you’re that person who can provide the best therapy for yourself!
When you meditate, you’re listening to your thoughts, fears, concerns, ideas, goals, and you could never express all of these overwhelming thoughts to your therapist even if you wanted to.
You’re the most honest person when you’re one-on-one with yourself. Let your thoughts buzz around and fly in your head. You don’t have to answer those questions and concerns, just listen to them. Even when you’re only listening or watching them from a distance, you’re giving yourself a mind massage and this will give you tremendous benefits in the long run.
5. Your ego will start to dissipate – but your self-confidence will rise
To begin a regular meditation practice, every guru will recommend to just start – to just sit and breathe in and breathe out and focus on your breath while watching your thoughts fly by.
But later on, you will notice how your meditative mind starts to separate itself from what you’re calling “myself” or from “I”.
You will look at yourself from an outsider perspective and you will be able to have a more objective view of yourself, your life, your ideas, fears, concerns or goals. It will help you a lot to break out from that bubble called “myself”.
As meditation guru Sadhguru said a lot of times: “I am not the body, I am not even the mind”.
Now the question “Who or what am I?” will arise and there is a start of seeking and there is a start of you taking yourself less seriously and having less harsh judgment on yourself.
6. Meditation will improve your sleep
There is one very memorable and inspiring story on how Buddha and his disciple wanted to drink water from a lake.
Buddha told one of his disciples to go fetch some water from a lake, but the water was muddy and the disciple returned empty-handed. The disciple was worried that the two of them won’t have anything to drink and turned to Buddha in fear.
Buddha simply asked him after some time to go back to fetch some water. This time, the water was clear because all animals left the area and mud had settled down. Buddha told him: “Look at what you did to make the water clean. You let it be, and the mud settled down on its own, and now you have clear water.”
This is an illustration of how our mind and our thoughts work.
You have to let it be, you have to let the mud settle down and let the crystal clear thoughts rise to the surface.
Meditation will help you to settle the mud of your stressful thoughts and to have a clear stream of thoughts in your head. Once your mind is at ease, you will sleep better and be more relaxed, which will lead to a healthier lifestyle.
Sleep is the best healer.
When you’re sleeping, you’re not doing anything physical, but your body is still quite active – just like in meditation.
Our Western culture and we as men are always focused to do something, to fix something, to find some solution. But as you can see, nature is sending a clear message – a lot of times doing nothing is the best thing you can do.
7. Meditation will (maybe) lead to enlightenment
If you’re a seeker in this life, you have tons of questions about life in general.
You’re questioning everything, but when you’re doing everything only with your mind as a weapon, it can be dangerous. Your mind is a good servant, but a bad master.
Your subconscious self is controlling more than 95 % of your thoughts and activities. Meditation and everything connected to it will help you to lower down that percentage in the long run. Even if you lower it down by 1% it’s a huge success and it takes a lot of time to do that.
Meditation will help you produce positive feelings and emotions inside yourself. It will help you to better manage your energy. If you practice it long enough you will be able to manage your behavior better, take control over your activities and handle your emotions and energy on a much higher level.
Conclusion
Just like any other activity, the more and longer you do it you will become better at it.
After a while, you will start feeling a myriad of benefits, from physical (such as improved sleep, relaxation and less pain) to emotional (increased focus, memory, self-confidence).
The journey of becoming skilled in meditation is long, but it’s rewarding in every step of the way. After you start, you will start feeling the difference already after your first session. After a couple of weeks, you will start feeling drastically different, while after years of meditating you will be a completely different person.
But the first step to get there is to do nothing. Sit and do nothing. Can you do it?
Estelle Liotard is a writer and a frequent contributor writer at Trust My Paper. She is an experienced content creator and a writer who excels in different spheres of marketing. In her spare time, Estelle enjoys quiet afternoons on her balcony and cooking.
Cover Image credits: Photo by theformfitness from Pexels
