The Art of Stillness

Meditation has long since been known to have positive effects that include reduction in stress levels, increased concentration, and self-healing. In these days of stress, and with the lockdown in place, practising meditation can help you stay calm, use your time productively, and improve your health in several ways. For those who don’t know how to, there are even apps that help you meditate through various methods. Healthcare India explores this age-old practice that is getting increasingly popular

- Bindu Gopal Rao

Meditation, a practice that dates back to several centuries, is a simple yet profound gift that humanity could receive. It is the art of allowing you to connect to who yourself are, go deep within, helping you calm your mind, release tension, stress, and find balance and peace. With the growing hustle in our lives, and situations where every person is stressed for most part of their day, adding small and easy meditative practices can help bring about brilliant shifts in your mindset and lives.

Historical Routes

Meditation has been around in India for many thousands of years and dates back to 5000 to 3500 BCE. Meditation is a practice where the technique of mindfulness or focussing attention on any particular object, activity or thought is practised by an individual. This is done to get the focus and attention to achieve a clear and calm, emotionally stable state of mind. In fact, meditation as such is hard to define, as there are varying practices between traditions and within them as well. Meditation has been practised since time immemorial across religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and all of these have often had the same goal -- to show the path towards enlightenment and selfrealisation.

The earliest records of meditation find its origins in the Hindu traditions of Vedanta. There are many popular forms of meditation including mindfulness, spiritual and focussed meditation, through movement, mantras and transcendental meditation. Incidentally, the word meditation comes from meditari, that means to think/to exercise the mind; and mederi, meaning, to heal, in Latin. It is said that it was the great saint Gyaneshwar who started teaching meditation way back in the 14th century. There are references, however, to rishis meditating in the Himalayas well before that, and there is mention in our epics, Ramayan and Mahabharat too.