Is Live Longevity, living healthier and longer a good enough reason for you to meditate?

Is Live Longevity, living healthier and longer a good enough reason for you to meditate?

Mindfulness in Meditation

In various conversations this week topic of meditation came up. I personally have meditated on and off since I started my NLP and Huna training in 1994. It has been pretty consistent for a while on a weekly basis. Then when work and family got in the way, I lost the discipline.  I know it is beneficial, I know that coming out always tells me this was time well spent, and still I keep “dropping out.” Let me share some of last week’s experience on meditation.  Monday night, in the “Inner Circle” Internet marketing coaching I get from THE Internet expert from the UK, Alex Jeffreys, he shared his resistance towards meditation. Despite that, he put it in his goals for 2015 to meditate at least once.  Many of my friends and colleagues play lip service to this. The company actually provides “relaxation pods,” however people are scared to go there, for fear of being seen as unproductive. Managers are largely ignorant about the benefits. Mindfulness Meditation is a rising star in the meditation world – meditation with a focus, such as proposed by Meng from Google, in “Search inside yourself.” In the recording of the Teleclass that I follow from Joe Dispenza, or “Dr. Joe,” he explained the beneficial effects of meditation.

 

health care  Is Live Longevity, living healthier and longer a good enough reason for you to meditate? You are the Placebo

Title: You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
Owner: drjoedispenza

In his latest book “You are the placebo” he describes carefully what the influence of our thinking is on our physical being, supported by actual brain scan proof. He will say that “energy is the epiphenomenon over matter.” Now what the heck does that mean, you may wonder? It means that when we think, thoughts are actually energy, and that that energy influences how we express genes at a epigenetic level. This ultimately directly affects our health and longevity.

Stress and Telomeres, the Human Longevity Calculators?

In his January Teleclass Dr. Joe explained research which has shown that chromosomes are protected by so-called telomeres, and that those telomeres get shorter when we age. They even get shorter faster when we’re under pressure of stress. And when they are shorter, cells less effectively replicate and ultimately die off sooner, so they are a kind of longevity metric, or “longevity calculator”. So what? It influences our health and lifespan. Stress, whether perceived or real, is simply not good for us, and reducing the duration of the stress response is an important antidote. So, perceived and real stress shortens telomeres. The question is – can this be reversed? How do I reduce the duration of the stress response?

Men with Prostate Cancer Reverse their Conditions Through Meditation

In a study with males that are highly driven and under stress, do multi-tasking, eat on the go whose lifestyle is out of balance, and who developed low risk prostate cancer, it was found that the telomeres had significantly shortened. Subsequently These men were taught how to exercise, relax, do yoga, meditate and find the present moment, change what they consume and create support groups where they share their emotional states and fears. After only six weeks into the program they upregulated 500 new genes, that had begun to produce loss of information, and started to downregulate 200 genes that had to do with their prostatic conditions. Moreover, their telomeres had grown by a whopping 30%! By rebalancing physically, emotionally and chemically, reducing stress, their change in livestyle has reversed their conditions. In certain men, the scientists and medical doctors could not find the cancer. 

Women with Breast Cancer Stop Aging of their Cells.

Similar studies were done with 88 women in breast cancer, distressed and upset about their diagnosis. Women were put in the following three groups, and and their telomeres were measured before and after 12 weeks.

  1. Eight weeks of meditation and becoming conscious of unconscious thoughts, noticing unconscious urges and behaviors, and look at grudges and emotions that tend to knock them out of balance, noticing them without participating in them, in addition to a certain amount of yoga.
  2. 12 weeks of group therapy, at the share difficult emotions they have, and conscious habits that they want to change and the group created a community with conditions to support each other and not staying in certain places.
  3. Six hours of stress management course.

Women in the first two groups who practiced mindfulness and metacognition, and did yoga, stopped the shortening of their telomeres. Women’s telomeres in the third group shortened. In other words the scientists have proven that a certain amount of meditation and yoga have a positive effect on DNA in breast cancer patients (University of Calgary, Linda Carlson.) – see interview here. Finding the present moment, observing their actions and emotions in a non-judgmental way, was enough to reduce  their heart stress hormone levels, their cortisol levels, allowed them to keep the telomere length, not activating the aging of their cells.

Do the Telomer Lengthening Work: MEDITATE

So when you exercise, learn how to reduce your stress, and become conscious of your unconscious negative or self-limiting thoughts, and reduce these self-limiting thoughts, in one to two years your telomeres get 25% longer. This means that over time you increase your lifespan, and influencing your genetic expression, or in other words, your health. What does that mean for you and me? By taking time to sit down, become aware of negative thoughts, and regulate your emotional state that keeps you bound to the past , by doing something different, exercise, move body in different way, you lengthen your lifespan. So taking time in the day, finding the present moment, and not allowing yourself to think about the future, or run to the past, by realizing that those emotions have an effect on your body, and by dissociating from your body in meditation, you actually slow down cell aging and longevity. Dr. Joe’s meditation method takes about 45 minutes in the day. Who wouldn’t want to invest that in health and longevity? The challenge is that the urgency of the moment, work, family pushes out the priority of sitting down in meditation. That is one of the worst human traps we can fall in. Usually when things become urgent, because we get ill,  we may contemplate changing and balancing our lifestyle. Not always, though. My personal relevance? Neither my brother or sister, who both died from cancer in the last 18 months, where interested in meditation, and it frustrates me that I could not convince them. My brother laughed at the self-help groups that were offered. My sister, more inclined to alternative ways, dismissed it as “not for me.” Both where very much people”on the go,” with a lot of perceived and real stress in life. Apart from smoking, we now know their telomeres where short. Alex Jeffreys, making multiple millions per year at 3o-some years old, reminded me of the benefits of journaling and reflection at the end of the day. I started to pick that up again. Blogging is good. Returning to Dr. Joe’s “guided” meditation is next. Time for the new schedule. Life is too much fun to have your telomeres shortened! What do you think? Would you change your lifestyle or do you keep playing Russian Roulette with your telomeres?

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About the Author

I seek the difference that makes the difference for challenges in life. For me, that means learning, getting out of the comfort zone, often rocking the boat with sacred cows. Pharmacist with IT business degree and certified coach, trainer, hypnotherapist. Dutch born Swiss Citizen.

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