Vishen Lakhiani argues that regular meditation can reverse biological aging by reducing stress and optimizing hormones. Studies suggest 8 to 15 years of body-age reversal with multi-year practice, and he describes visible changes in appearance and vitality from meditative retreats.
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So everyone's trying to look younger. If I had a magic wand and I could weave it over the planet, I would encourage people to try and look healthier. You know, we have conflated youth and health, but that's actually not true. Lots of people age and get healthier. I'm actually 87 years old. Meditation is extraordinarily powerful at reversing the body age. Just kidding. I'm not 87, but I'm 44. And I actually feel like I'm in better shape. I feel more vibrant, I feel stronger than I did in my late 20s. And that is a direct result of getting my buns to the chair every single day, twice a day, with meditation. So interestingly, meditation can reverse your body age by somewhere between eight to 15 years. So even if you have 40 candles on your birthday cake, you might have the body age of a 30 year old. And the same is true with your brain age. They've done studies where 60 year olds have the brain ages of 50 year olds. So again, it's not about being younger, it's about being vibrant and healthy at the age that you are now. Why is this? Why on earth could sitting quietly in a chair reverse your body age? Well, stress is aging us all expeditiously. Look at a photo of any president the day they take office, and that same president four years later. All of them, they age so quickly. Now why is that? I've never been president, but I hear it's quite stressful. I right, your sleep is not great. You're constantly filling your body with adrenaline and cortisol, and those chemicals are acidic in nature. So when you sit down to meditate, you actually make your body more alkaline. So it's like drinking a green juice for your brain. And that alkalinity changes your skin elasticity, your brain elasticity, it optimizes your hormone function, which as we know, is going to change the way that you're building muscles. So if you've been feeling tired or like you just don't look or feel like yourself anymore, I would ask the question, how stressed am I? And am I taking care of my spirit? Am I giving my body the rest and the nourishment that it needs in order to perform and to feel its best? So when I teach, I actually notice a shift in people. Within a few days. I'll notice people come in on day one and their faces are quite hardened. Sometimes it just looks like their light has been turned off. And by the end of their four day experience, it's like they. They feel more alive, more radiant. There's a sparkle in their eyes. There's more color in their cheeks. Sometimes I don't even recognize them. I'm like, wait, who are you? Like, I'm the person who was in the class for four days. It's like. Well, like a totally different person. But the study that I mentioned where you can reverse your body age between 8 to 15 years, that was done over 5 years. So having a regular daily practice for years at a time is the thing that you need to do if you really want to, you know, strengthen those telomeres. You. Which telomeres at the casing at the end of your DNA. So if you think about your DNA as a shoelace, then telomeres are a little plastic casing at the end. And if that gets disintegrated, then your DNA unravels more quickly, which increases your body age. So the good news is that there's a way to reverse this, all right? And it is meditation. Meditation is going to get rid of the stress in your body. And the cool thing is, what I teach in the M word is not just getting rid of your stress from today, it's getting rid of all that stress from your past so you actually start feeling better. It's like you're putting deposits in your health bank account. And honestly, when you start doing that, everything gets better. So, look, if you don't have a daily meditation practice, it's very possible that you have something known as resting bitch face or resting dick face, whatever you want to call it, where you just are just sitting there and you just look mean, and there's so many obstacles in the world. There's so much division, there's so many actual crises happening. We don't need people just having resting bitch face. We want to have resting bliss face, where you're just chilling, living your life, and people feel drawn to you. People can feel the openness of your heart because you're not guarded. You're not in constant fight or flight. You're not constantly looking for an enemy or someone to run away from. Instead, heart is open. You feel at home in your body. And then after having a daily meditation practice, you get resting bliss face. So then even if you're hangry, you're still going to have this baseline of bliss in your nervous system. So that even if you're having a tough day or someone's been rude to you or it's time for a snack, it doesn't mean that your baseline level of dopamine and serotonin which are bliss chemicals, are going to run dry, but you're going to have reserves of those, which is going to help you to feel amazing no matter what the circumstances. So if you would like to save tens of thousands of dollars on skincare products and procedures, honestly, you should start a meditation practice right now.
