The Importance of Meditation

Around the end of 2012, I had started to investigate more about meditation as an important tool to achieve deeper spirituality, improve personal well being and happiness.  As someone constantly on the go, permanently being enslaved to mobile devices, I felt that there was a greater than even chance that I was losing myself in the noise and losing track of life's priorities. The search for some quiet time in our daily lives to lift oneself above the noise, achieving some spirituality and to find a balance that is sustainable, is not unique.

The more I searched, the more convinced I was on the benefits of meditation. Meditation has been shown to confer clear health benefits and the science of it is being documented.  The Mayo Clinic (http://www.mayoclinic.org/meditation/art-20045858) promotes the activity amongst patients to achieve calm and inner peace, and has found that meditation contributes greatly to the improvement of the well being of its patients. (http://life.gaiam.com/article/how-does-meditation-affect-body).

Matthieu Ricard is dubbed "The World's Happiest Man".  He meditates a lot. He subjected himself to scientific research and he has been found to have a much higher activity pattern in the brain's left prefrontal cortex which in turn has been found to correlate with happiness. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2225634/Is-worlds-happiest-man-Brain-scans-reveal-French-monk-abnormally-large-capacity-joy-meditation.html).  Tan Chade Meng, a Singaporean who works in Google, is now world famous for promoting the benefits of meditation in America, which he calls "mindfulness". (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8fcqrNO7so).  But most importantly over the year, in my conversations with people who practice meditation, there was a common thread that was sufficient to to convince me of the benefits of the practice : people who meditate appeared much less stressed, calmer, more thoughtful and gentler as they walked through life.

I had accumulated literature on meditation in the hope of learning the practice.  A friend (thank you Grace) gave me some CDs on meditation. Another friend in Indonesia (thank you Djohan Marzuki) loaned me books to read.  I talked to people - religious and non-religious.  While all of this helped to introduce me to the practice, it did not really help me grasp the concept of meditation.  Meditation is incredibly difficult to learn without personal guidance and encouragement.  Shutting out the noise, quietening the mind and "being in the present" is much easier said that done.  I was not even sure I was doing it right. After a year of searching and exploring, and on the advice of a number of friends (thank you especially Albert), I submitted to going to a retreat so that I could learn the practice properly. This ran the risk of people wondering if I was in a mid-life crisis or if I was in a conversion process.  Truth is, I simply wanted to learn about meditation.

This is the introduction piece.  The next piece will detailed the experience and the interesting things I learnt at Bali Usada.