5 Reasons for Taking Up Meditation

Many people start to meditate in order to find peace and serenity, or to reduce their stress level. These are two very good reasons, and research validates them. The Buddhist tradition also supports them. Serenity meditation, or calming the mind, is an essential part of Vipassana, a basic Buddhist meditation practice, and we have Buddha’s own words in support of the use of meditation for stress reduction: ”I teach only two things: suffering and the end of suffering.“ The original word he used for suffering, Dukkha, has many connotations, and is now translated by some scholars as stress.

Here are three other reasons I have discovered in the course of my thirty-year adventure with meditation:

Meditation Can Help You Deal With Your Own Aggressiveness, and to Understand the Aggressiveness of Others

Do you ever wonder why there is so much violence and so many wars in the world? In Old Path, White Clouds, his interpretive story of Buddha’s life, Thich Nhat Hanh describes Buddha’s awakening as the realization that all his previous lives were in him now - they were not merely past history. The Buddha saw that he was also all those beings in the present moment. Note that what Buddhists call “previous lives” can also be understood as “evolutionary past” in the context of evolutionary psychology.

The animal that fights and kills in order to become the alpha male, the cat who kills a songbird just to play with it even though it is not hungry (cats kill three and a half billion songbirds a year), and the lion who attacks a cub just because it is not a member of the same pride, are still in us. The schoolyard bully, the hockey player who knowingly inflicted a concussion on a member of the opposing team, and the bankers who caused the recent financial crisis for personal profit were obeying evolutionary urges.