Transcript of Dr. Michael Grossman shares how meditation is a key fundamental practice to experience good health and how it is important to a wellness lifestyle. You may view the YouTube video here.
Hi, I am Dr. Michael Grossman. I want to welcome you to this weekly discussion on being healthy. I am traveling with my family, my grandchildren, and my children here in Israel. We’re here for two weeks, and I’m inspired to talk about some of the keys to health that relate to meditation and spirituality. I’ve taught meditation for over 40 years and taught thousands of people to meditate. And there’s so much research on meditation that indicates that meditation is a key fundamental practice for everybody to experience good health.
Being healthy means balancing your physiology, balancing the intensity of stress with the intensity of peacefulness, balancing your brain and your brain waves, balancing your hormones, balancing your nervous system – you have a sympathetic nervous system that stimulates you to be active and dynamic – you have a parasympathetic nervous system that calms you down, and both of them have to be in balance to be healthy.
There are so many different hormones in the body, and some of the hormones are stress hormones. Some of the hormones are calming and relaxing hormones. We need to have a balance of these different hormones.
Research on meditation is very clear that you create a peaceful, calm, relaxed state in the physiology. We know when you sleep, you get about a 10% reduction in the amount of oxygen that you use when you’re sleeping, which means your body is resting. You don’t need to breathe so much, you need to get so much oxygen into the body. When you meditate, you get about a 20% reduction in the amount of oxygen to use. So, the kind of rest you get in meditation is in much deeper rest and not much you get in sleeping. The kind of stress that you release in meditation is a much deeper quality of stress release, than the stress release just from the normal sleeping process.
When you sleep, you go through a process of quieting down, getting calmer, and then you dream, and you get active. In your mind, you’re dreaming, and you’re active, and then you get calm and peaceful in your sleep, and you go back and forth. That’s the nature of creating a healthy sleep that dissolves stress. Now, when you meditate, you go through the same kind of things. You have times when you’re peaceful, times when your mind is active, having thoughts, and it’s kind of peaceful, having thoughts. But overall, the kind of sleep that you get is a certain quality of rest. But it’s much deeper when you’re meditating, and you could dissolve stress from years and years before, and it’s kind of stuck in the body when you meditate.
I’ve taught thousands of people meditation. There are many different types of meditation, and they each have a value. But when you learn meditation, you will change your body’s functioning, and you learn how to feel more peaceful in spite of business. And when you can maintain a calm, peaceful quality of activity in the midst of a lot of stress, then you never build up more stress in your physiology. Your stress level stays down, and you gradually dissolved more, more stress, and then it just seems normal to be peaceful. You feel like that is your normal way of being just being relaxed and peaceful.
That changes your blood pressure. It changes your hormones, it changes your brain waves, and it creates to living longer and living healthier. I encourage everybody to learn a process of meditation that works for you.
Now, the kind of meditation I teach is very easy. It’s very simple. Everyone can do it. There’s no effort involved, and I’ve written a book on meditation. It’s going to come out, be published fairly soon. The book you will find it on the website ocwellness.com website when it is actually out to be available. Meditation is something that I regularly teach several times a month in the area in my office in Southern California. But you can also go on the Internet and get a link to get meditations that I have, which actually teaches you the actual meditations that you could do.
And the link to get my meditation tapes is orderthemarriagemap.com. The Marriage Map is the book I’ve written with my wife, and if you go to the orderthemarriagemap.com, you can get these meditation tapes. We’ll allow you to learn how to meditate, and you can use these tapes on your own. Be able to actually enjoy the meditations and change your physiology and change your life. Be able to feel calm and peaceful. So, I encourage you to do this. It’s really an essential part of a wellness lifestyle.
People generally need to meditate for 15 or 20 minutes once or twice a day. You can see, even if you want to do it five or 10 minutes, you still get great value from.
If you have questions, you can fill out the Contact form on: OCWellness.com.
