Meditation has many benefits that can improve both your brain and body. Incorporating a daily meditation practice will not only improve your MVMNT practice, but also carry into your life as well. Here are a few reasons we love meditation:

Stress Reduction

One of the most common reasons people may dip their toe in the meditation pool is to reduce stress, and there is a good reason for it. When our bodies become stressed, there is an increase in the hormone cortisol that increases inflammation in our bodies. Inflammation is the culprit for many diseases but in the context of training, poor stress management will increase cortisol and inflammation resulting in poor recovery. A regular meditation practice helps reduce inflammation, which will ultimately increase your ability to recover fast.

Self-Awareness

Meditation also teaches you to go into your body, take a look around and start to notice. Self-awareness around your thoughts, feelings and your physical body is incredibly powerful when it comes to training and recovery. It gives you a moment to pause and explore what your current experience is. With a regular meditation practice, you will become accustomed to noticing your thoughts and feelings and letting them pass through you or observing them without any attachment. You will also become more self-aware of your physical body. Both of these have a huge carryover to both your performance and mobility practice, not to mention your life. Meditating daily teaches you the skill of observation, curiosity, and releasing attachments in many areas of life.

Improves Your Focus

In the days of multi-tasking, smart phones, and the many demands of life, it’s common to have a shorter attention span as our attention is continually pulled in different directions throughout the day. Incorporating a meditation practice helps improve your focus. If you are training to run a marathon, you do not start your first run by doing the whole thing. You may start with a 10 minute run, or a goal of a 5K run, and gradually build from there. It’s important to give yourself time to adapt and gain the endurance for the big run. Meditating is the same thing. Starting small will work that muscle of learning to pay attention and focus. This has tremendous benefits of helping you focus or stay in your body not only during your daily MVMNT practice but also during competition, work, time with your loved ones, and all the other areas of life.

Sleep

There are many studies that show how meditation helps with sleep. Meditation teaches you to relax your body and control your thoughts and tap into your parasympathetic nervous system, all beneficial to helping you wind down at the end of the day and get a good night’s rest. Sleep is essential to your recovery and a huge benefit for incorporating meditation into your day.

Be A Better Person

Meditation is proven to impact your mindset, emotional state and physical body. Meditation has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety by reducing the production of cortisol. This can actually have an impact on all three areas listed above simultaneously; your heart rate will be reduced, you will become less anxious, and you may feel less unsettled. You will become the observer of your thoughts instead of spinning with them. As we start to use meditation we being to separate ourselves from our thoughts and as we practice this more, we naturally become a less reactive person. Some types of meditation also focuses on forgiveness, positive thinking, compassion, etc. These ultimately help increase self compassion and kindness, improve your relationships and help you to become an overall better human. Who doesn’t love that?! Check out our Mindful MVMNT Podcast for guided meditations below.