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Can Meditation Help With Depression?

There are many perspectives on the causes of depression – the medical community blames depression on our foods habits and lifestyle while the spiritual community believes depression to be the caused by deluded thoughts and wrong perception. Whether you believe that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in your body or by the patterns of your thinking, the fact remains that a depressive state originates in the mind. A calm and silent mind does not allow for a depressive state of being and it’s possible for everyone to practice this state of mental quietude irrespective of their medical condition.

How Does Meditation Help Relive Depression?

Meditation in simple terms is the practice of steadying your mind through “presence”. What is presence? It’s simple a state of alertness where one is not lost in the stream of thinking. When your attention is lost in the stream of thoughts, originating in your mind, you are in a “dream state” and each thought tends to pull you around like a magnet. This is a very powerless state to be in, and in most people, in whom negative thoughts are prominent, such a state of being can lead to depression.

Each thought has the capacity to affect the vibration of your body, in other words, each thought can affect your energy field. A thought which has a “negative” content will cause your energy field to vibrate in a manner which feels like resistance or suffering. When one is constantly in the grip of negative thoughts, the energy field of your body can feel suffocating and creates a depression in your state of being.

When you are feeling depressed, it means that the energy field of your body is replete with resistance created by a negative emotion or negative pattern of thinking. Under these circumstances one feels very de-motivated and lacks the drive to do anything constructive. The best thing to do at this time is not avoid wallowing further into the grip of your mind, or emotional field, and stay conscious in a state of meditation.

You can practice any form of meditation. Some simple forms of meditation are – breath awareness, focusing on a sound (like om), focusing on an object or simply focusing on silence. The best meditation to perform when in a state of depression would be to focus on silence. Just place your attention on the silent space within you and allow the emotions, or thoughts, to frit through the space of your body.

Here are a few pointers on how meditation can help alleviate depression

• Silence is very nourishing to the body and it helps the cells heal themselves naturally. So any chemical imbalance in the body can be rectified simply by practicing inner silence.
• Meditation allows your attention to become free of the stream of thinking. This will allow your negative thoughts to lose momentum and subside eventually.
• Consciousness has the power to transmute confusion to clarity, negative thoughts to positive thoughts and restlessness to calm. Meditation is a great way to bring consciousness of your being into activeness, which is inherently a very powerful state.
• Meditation brings in “space” in the area of a noisy mind. This space of silence allows intelligence to flow through. One is amazed at how solutions can make themselves evident when one allows some silence to come into the noise of the mind.
• Meditation can increase the vibration of your energy field and help you attract positive thoughts and feelings. Consciousness, or silent awareness, has a nourishing effect on the body and automatically hikes your vibration.

The bottom line is that meditation helps bring about a conscious awareness into the area of noise dominated mind. The energy of silence can easily counteract the negative thoughts and emotions. Also, meditation is considered to be healthy for the body because it has the capacity to bring about a balance by rejuvenating the energy field of your being.

So Can Meditation Help a Person Suffering from Depression?

When faced with tough situations, or anxious periods, it’s common for the mind to get insecure and enter into depression. Under these conditions, meditation can help relieve depression more than any other activity or action. Any action taken from a depressive state of being can create further trouble, so it’s best to use meditation to calm your mind and improve your vibration, which in turn will automatically allow clarity and solutions to seep through.