Meditation Improves Overall Quality of Life

Meditation Improves Overall Quality of Life

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Meditation can help you develop calmness, sharp awareness, and mental clarity. These qualities can in turn help improve your financial situation in two ways.

  1. Firstly, meditation can help you set your financial priorities and manage your money more judiciously.
  2. Secondly, meditation can help you identify money-money opportunities that you could not identify before, due to mental turbulence or lack of mindfulness and deep reflection.


Also Read: Seeing and Working with True Nature



These two ways in which meditation can improve your financial situation, are briefly reviewed as follows:

Meditation can help improve your money-handling skills

Regardless of how much money you might have, if you do not manage it in an organized and mindful manner, then you will always run into financial issues.

When you apply your meditation-induced mindfulness skills to your finances, you would realize that there is a clear distinction between needs and wants. A need is something necessary for survival, while a want is something that an individual desires, but would be able to live without it.

With the clarity and mindfulness gained through meditation, you can identify your needs and separate them from your wants. Your needs can include food, rental for your apartment, transportation to and from work, monthly utility bills, detergents, etc.

Your wants can include having a lavish meal in a restaurant, renting a hotel room for your weekend gate away, or acquiring tickets to attend a musical concert and theatre event. The priority would be to satisfy your needs and only consider attending to your wants if you still have the financial means to do so, after satisfying your needs.

Meditation can help you develop the calmness, clarity, and perceptive sharpness necessary to understand how to set priorities for your budget.

Meditation can also help you make the best buying decisions. You might for instance find it necessary to purchase food in a local farmers’ market at discounted rates, instead of spending twice the amount for the same products in your local supermarket.

With the compassion and deep loving-kindness, you gain through meditation, you might find it appropriate to support small-scale local farmers in this way. Meditation can help you spend the right amount of money on the right products at the right time and in the right way.

Meditation can also help you avoid impulsive buying; a phenomenon that is known to be of adverse effects on personal finance. Impulsive buying is the tendency of a person to buy goods and services without planning. When a person takes such buying decisions at the spur of the moment, it is usually triggered by emotions and feelings. 

Meditation can help you understand the need to establish a weekly or monthly budget and stick to it. Meditation will help you plan your budget and live within your means. With a proper spending plan, you might be able to put some money aside as emergency funds.

Meditation helps you identify money-making opportunities

With the sharpened perception, mental clarity, and focused reflection acquired through meditation, you would be able to quickly identify and explore money-making opportunities that you could not identify before.

The energy and courage gained through meditation would help you to boldly pursue such money-making opportunities, with enhanced prospects of actually accomplishing your goal. When you attain a state of deep meditation, you become exposed to the realm of inspiration. You can then access bright ideas from such a state and translate them into reality.



Meditation can help boost your performance at work

According to an article that was published in the Times, a certain chemical company in Detroit, USA, implemented 20 minutes meditation slots for employees at work. After three years of this program, the company registered staggering results about employee behavior, productivity, and company profits.

Absenteeism fell by 85%, productivity rose by 120%, quality control rose by 240%, injuries dropped by 70%, sick days fell by 76%, and profit soared by 520%.

A certain study conducted in the Netherlands revealed that mindfulness meditation increased creativity and problem-solving ability. Arizona State University identified the benefits of meditation in the workplace, including the following: improved focus and concentration, improved creativity, improved mood, reduced stress and anxiety, and strengthened personal and professional relationships.

Many companies are now keen to implement meditation slots in their workplace because meditation has been proven to increase employee productivity. Companies such as Apple, Salesforce, and Nike, are reported to have set up meditation rooms in their workplace.  Marc Benioff, the chief executive officer of Salesforce, has installed meditation rooms throughout Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.

It is very easy to understand why meditation can give rise to a substantial increase in productivity. Work-related stress and anxiety are of common occurrence, especially when targets are to be met under very tight deadlines. By being able to alleviate stress, meditation help employees eliminate fatigue, sluggishness, and proneness to making mistakes that might be associated with stress. They become calmer and more relaxed; with a clear mind and focused attention. These are among the prerequisites for high productivity.

Meditation can also increase the production of gamma waves, which are associated with loving-kindness, compassion, and sympathy. This can improve interpersonal work-related relationships in the workplace, giving rise to highly motivated and productive teams.

Meditation also increases the overall performance of the brain. This gives rise to better judgment, perceptual sharpness, and enhanced decision-making skills. The Alpha waves responsible for inducing creativity, increase during meditation. This can help employees find creative solutions to work-related matters.  



Meditation greatly enhances academic performance

Several studies have demonstrated that meditation can help students improve their academic performance. A study conducted at the University of California revealed that students who meditated before examinations and before attending classes scored higher grades in exams.

The study was conducted by George Mason University researcher, professor Robert Youmans, and University of Illinois doctoral student, Jared Ramsburg. During the investigation, students were randomly selected to engage in meditation before classes. Amazingly but not surprisingly, students who meditated all scored higher grades than students who did not meditate.

In an article entitled:  Short-Term Meditation Intervention Improves Self-Regulation and Academic Performance, published in the July 2014 Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior, researchers in Beijing, China, documented the effects of mindfulness exercises on the attentional attributes and test scores of a group of 208 students between the ages of 13 and 18. The students were divided into two groups.

For 6 weeks, one group practiced a variety of mindfulness meditation techniques, while the other group practiced simple relaxation techniques that did not include mindfulness or any form of concentration.

The group of students that practiced mindfulness meditation scored higher in tested subjects, including mathematics, foreign language, and literacy. Meditation increases focus and attention span; while also reducing stress and anxiety.

Meditation increases calmness and discipline, sharpens creativity, improves memory, offers mental clarity, and gives rise to a more powerful and efficient brain. All these conditions are recipes for enhanced academic performance.



Meditation can strengthen all romantic relationships

Statistics reveal that approximately 39% of all marriages in the United States, end up in divorce. According to recent divorce statistics, 42% of marriages in England and Wales, end up in divorce. Even marriages that survive divorce, do not yield a high level of satisfaction.  

According to Institute for Family Studies, the primary causes of divorce include infidelity and extramarital affairs, incompatibility, alcoholism, drug use, lack of commitment, too much conflict or arguments, financial problems, physical, verbal and emotional abuse.

The bottom line for marital or relationship fruitfulness is that it takes two to tango. For the marriage or relationship to be in a consistent state of good health, both parties must exercise significant effort and goodwill, in contributing to the health of the relationship. Only one person can’t contribute to the health of a relationship.

Marriage is a situation whereby two persons who are not 100% identical, decide to live a unified life. Thus, it is inevitable that there would be some differences between their personalities and perspectives on various matters about life and living. However, if the love between the two parties is sincere and strong, then any minor differences can be overcome.

A close examination of the factors that precipitate divorce reveals that a majority of these activators of divorce are related to the behavior of one or both parties. This implies that the right behavior is necessary for marital or romantic fruitfulness.

Thus, any activity that can help couples develop the right marital behavior, can be viewed as a catalyst for fruitful marital outcomes. That is where meditation plays a crucial role, in helping to foster happy romantic outcomes and fruitful marriages.

Deep meditation would enable the couple to get in touch with the deepest layers of awareness or consciousness within themselves. With this increase in consciousness, they will become cognizant of the fact that their partner is not just their object of affection, but a soul that is going through a physical experience.

Since both partners are souls going through a physical experience together, they would start attributing high value to the ultimate purpose of life; which is, to achieve spiritual growth. The partners would then see themselves as two souls supporting each other in their spiritual evolution. This shift in perspective will strengthen and deepen the relationship.

Through deep mindfulness meditation and mental clarity, the partners would realize the absolute necessity for self-love. Indeed, it is because you love yourself that your life matters to you. It is because you love yourself that you exert every effort to protect and sustain your life.

Since you cannot hurt what you love, the partners would find it necessary to stop self-abusive habits, such as alcoholism, the use of drugs, and indulgence in hostile emotions like anger.

Heightened awareness of self-love would also ensure that this love is extended to one’s partner. This would eliminate the sense of lack of commitment that one of the partners might be manifesting in the relationship. With deepened love and redefined perspectives comes compassion, kindness, mutual respect, and understanding.

Meditation techniques such as loving-kindness meditation, can eliminate any tendencies of hostility between couples, and replace them with mutual sympathy and compassion. Meditation would also make it possible for both partners to become more disciplined, humble, and tolerant.

Love and compassion for one another, coupled with humility and tolerance, will eliminate arguments, physical, verbal and emotional abuse. It will also ensure that the couple’s love for one another, is wholehearted and deep, and not half-hearted and shallow.

Even if the couple is facing financial hardship, they can utilize their meditation-induced newfound calmness and clarity, to formulate a strategy on how to generate an honest income. The couple would realize that hurting the person closest to you in any way, generates bad karma for the hurting party.

Hurting someone who loves and has trust in you, generates massive bad karma for the culprit. Through reflection, cooperation, and mutual support, any misunderstanding can be addressed with maturity, goodwill, and sensitivity.  

Couples should also learn to forgive each other. Even if you divorce and get married to someone else, if you do not approach the marriage with sincere intentions and deliberate goodwill, then it would only be a matter of time before you divorce again. Couples meditating together can deepen and solidify the emotional, mental and spiritual connection between them.



Conclusion

Meditation is an absolute necessity for our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health and wellbeing. It is an essential component of overall satisfactory life. Meditation has everything to offer and nothing to take from you.

Investing in meditation is one of the best entrepreneurial decisions you would ever make. It requires very little resources and generates an exponential lifetime return.

This single investment will abundantly reward and enrich all aspects of your life, including finances, work, career, education, relationships, family, health, and holistic happiness. If you have not yet learned how to meditate up to now, then all along, you have been denying yourself the opportunity of a formidably enriched and empowered life.

Now that you are aware of the transformational miracles of meditation, it is time to embrace and celebrate the immensity of its unraveled benevolence.

Happy meditation!



Related: Coping with Life Changes 


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