Yoga And Meditation Centers You
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by Marsha Maung
Nov 14th, 2008
If someone shot me a sales pitch about meditation and yoga ten years back, they would have been sent teetering out of the room with a shoe mark on their bottom! That was how big a skeptic I was about being involved in yoga and….*scoff scoff*….meditation. I mean, come on….get real. This is life that we’re talking about here, what’s meditation and bending of limbs got to do with life and living?
That was why I was involved in lots of cardiovascular activities and classes when I was still enrolled with the gym…and completely ignored the yoga or mind and body classes they made available. ‘Only wimps and the weak attend these classes’, I would laugh.
That was before anxiety, stress and everyday worries scraped off layers after layers of happiness from me. Slowly, the quality of life deteriorated. This can happen to anyone…not just freelancers, mothers or parents. It can happen to little kids as young as five if the kid is subjected to a lot of stressful activities during his or her waking hours. What yoga and meditation can do for little kids is amazing – because kids need an outlet of release more than an adult need it, after every yoga session, they’ll feel invigorated simply because of one fact…that yoga poses massages all the organs of the body while lubricating the joints and muscles. While you can massage the scalp or the arms/legs, one can hardly massage one’s kidney from the outside…imagine that! It’s only through yoga poses that these internal bodily systems receive stimulating massages.
Along my journey, as I opened up to the idea of BALANCE, I discovered the negative impression that I had about yoga and meditation was unfounded and not justified at all.
Sportsmen and people of power….all of them resort to yoga and meditation – and the most amazing thing is that they don’t have to realize that they’re actually meditating! I am dead serious. For instance, my mother’s religion requires that she chant for long hours on end despite not knowing precisely what it was that she was chanting. And yet, she has, time and again, told me how calm and collected she becomes after each session.
Now that I think about it, it does not matter what religion it was, it was beneficial to her because it improved her concentration and furthermore, provided her with mental and emotional balance…which is what she needed desperately.
Sportsmen remain focused on their target and mission by going into deep meditative state sometimes and they use this time to envision the positive so that the positive vibe can stay with them throughout their ‘race’ and influence the results thereafter.
This is a scientific fact because many studies have been done in the past and it is an established fact that there is a direct correlation between ‘concentration’ or ‘focus’ and the level of achievement by sportsmen. While sportsmen can build their muscles, endurance and skill level with exercise, the mind remains to be the key to a successful athlete’s performance. When the mind is completely under control, the athlete becomes more effective, can endure more, persevere for a longer period of time and can guide the physical body in executing the mission.
For normal folks like you and me, it is time to discard with the notion of ‘meditation’ being for the spiritually-inclined, the religious, the mad or the obsessed. Meditation and yoga provides us with a focal point in which we can find a center…and the center of which we can find the balance.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marsha Maung is a Malaysian-based freelance writer with two kids. She spends her time ferrying her kids around, watering her plants, writing web content, SEO stuff, ghostwriting books and also indulges in the occasional Facebook-ing. Visit her blog for more dirty details on the life and times of a mother, writer, designer, housekeeper, coffee-maker, poop-wiper, chef...and just about everything else under the sun.
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