The Benefits of Silent Meditation

Hi, I'm Dr. Jameca Cooper, and today we're talking a little bit more about radical healing. First, make sure you subscribe to this channel and check out my other videos on radical healing. And today we're going to talk about the benefit of meditation again. So make sure you get the book I Am My Sister's Keeper: The Brown Girl's Guide to Radical Healing on Amazon. It talks a lot about lots of things, but one of the things that we talk about in this book is meditation and the benefits of meditation. It is very important. It's a very centering behavior and activity to engage in, so I highly recommend it. You can find the book on Amazon, of course. But I want to talk specifically about the benefit of silent meditation, because sometimes when you see videos or clips on meditation, you hear this calming music playing in the background. And now, there's nothing wrong with that, but I just want to inform you that there is another way to meditate. It's silent meditation, and there are lots and lots of benefits of silent meditation, but I'm going to talk specifically today about 4 benefits of silent meditation. But before I do that, I have to tell you about one of the things that I've heard. I've heard that other people feel that if you're able to drive in a car without any music playing, in silence, that you are psychotic. Now, this is hilarious to me because I think about so many people in my generation that drive with no music on a lot, and that's just based on the history of not having reliable radio stations back in the day. But sometimes people like to be in the car and they like to think, and they like to use that as their downtime and quiet time. So I don't know that music is an indicator of psychopathic behavior, but apparently people think that it is, so I think that's hilarious. Um, I think you should be able to drive in a car with no music and not be psychotic, hopefully. Um, I'm going to talk about 4 different benefits of silent meditation today, and the first one is silent meditation helps to improve concentration and focus. That's very important because that's one of the things we need a lot in today's world. Everything that we do is fast-paced. We get up in the morning, we're rushing, we're getting to work, we're driving fast, we get to work, we're rushing, we're rushing to get dinner. Everything is so fast that what people need now more than anything is to improve their concentration and focus. It's really hard for people to have what we call as psychologists sustained attention or sustained focus, being able to focus on one thing for a long period of time. So if you can improve that by meditating, then that's wonderful. One of the second benefits of silent meditation is that it helps to stimulate brain growth. So anytime that we can calm the brain, we can give the brain time to grow and to regenerate. What happens so much is that we keep our brains on all the time, and this used to not be the case. But when you think about the addition of personal computers, then you have desktops first, right? Then you had laptops. From that you have tablets, from that you have phones, then you have smartphones, now you have watches. You have pretty much gadgets that do everything and they stimulate you all day, every day. You never give your brain time to relax and to regenerate. Sometimes even at night people have notifications going off, which exactly never give your brain a time to regenerate and to rest. So we need to think about more ways that we can help our brain grow and to, to rest and to regenerate. One of the third benefits of silent meditation is that it improves insomnia. One of the reasons that some people have difficulty sleeping is because their brain is on all the time. They can't calm their brains down. So it's because the stimulation is going, going, going that they don't know how to tell the brain, hey, there is no stimulation going on right now. So when you can train yourself into meditating in a silent way and having that downtime, or what I like to call off time, then you can help improve your sleep. And this is a benefit to everyone because what I've noticed with my patients during the pandemic is people have sleep issues now that even those that didn't have them before, now they're struggling with how to get enough sleep or how to get restful sleep, which is just as big of a problem. The fourth way and the fourth benefit of silent meditation is that it encourages mindfulness. Now, if you watch my other videos, you know that I love me some mindfulness. I think everyone can utilize mindfulness in all areas of their life. So what is mindfulness? It's being able to stay in the moment, is being able to focus on what's going on in the moment. So an example is being stuck in traffic and focusing on, "Oh, I'm not going to get here. I'm going to get late. Look at that car up there. I'm going to go fast. I can't go around this car." Instead of that, you will focus on, "Oh, look at the trees. The colors on the trees and the leaves are beautiful," and focusing on things in that moment, such as trees, such as air, air quality, such as music, enjoying the song. Enjoying just being by yourself. All of these things are mindfulness practices. So that was the fourth benefit of silent meditation. But like I said before, there are many, many other ones. So I hope that you can start to incorporate silent meditation into your daily habits because I think it has a lot of health benefits. And as we move into a new year, I want to make sure that everyone is in a position to be better, to be healthier, to be well, to be less stressed, and to think about ways to have mindfulness and to have radical healing in all parts of your life. So hopefully you learned something. Make sure you check out my other videos and subscribe. Thanks, and I'm Dr. Jameca Cooper.