Meditation for beginners. The strange thing is that when I was 15, I meditated quite a bit.
I was dealing with some anger issues (mostly anger about being a teenager in a not-challenging-enough school system whose friends had started to act in inexplicable ways) and I’m not sure how I learned about it, but I had a regular practice for almost a year. Fast-forward 18 years, and I have a regular practice going again, but barely engaged in the practice in the interim. Beginning to meditate again was a challenge, and it took almost a year of knowing I should, wanting to, and planning on doing it before I finally started down the path. I’m a believer in the positive effects of meditation, because I remember them from when I was 15; I could go from the throes of an almost-hysterical freak-out to relative calm in less than 15 minutes, using breathing and visualization. The Meditation Tip of the Day. Daily Wisdom. Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Meditation Found To Increase Brain Size. People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don't.
Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input. In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more pronounced in older than in younger people.
That's intriguing because those sections of the human cortex, or thinking cap, normally get thinner as we age.