Meditation is a way to heal emotional, sexual, and intellectual trauma. You can dive back into your past and process emotions that you have likely forgotten or repressed. In the process you become more emotionally pure, more loving, and more content.

Meditation is not a life purpose. Meditation can help clear your path to finding your life purpose (it’s hard to be clear on what you want when you’re mired in negative emotions like fear and hatred). But if you want to be fulfilled, you’ll need to have a contribution and impact on the world in a way that is personally meaningful. Meditation brings a level of contentment, while life purpose brings fulfillment and satisfaction.

Meditation is one out of many healing modalities. It is often awarded significant praise, which is mostly earned. But there are many ways to heal painful emotions, including yoga, neurofeedback, EMDR therapy, Psychodrama, Acting, Lifting Weights, Dancing, Reparenting Your Inner Child and more.

Meditation has been around for thousands of years, since before the Buddha practiced it around 2,500 years ago.

Meditation is not likely to give you superpowers, though there are rare instances where people have reported things like pristine hearing, a sense of omnipresence, etcetera.

Is meditation religious?

It is not, though for some people it helps them connect to their religiosity.

What are the types of meditation?

Basically there are two – concentration and mindfulness.

In concentration meditation, you anchor your focus on the present moment, usually by paying attention to something constant like the ebb and flow of your breath, the flame of a candle, the sound of wind blowing, etc. You can even use the hum of you’re a/c unit to anchor your focus on the present moment.

The benefit of this is that it trains your mind to be present. The benefit of this is that when your mind is present, you feel content. When you think of the past of future you feel unpleasant emotions such as jealousy, fear, greed, hatred, grief, and apathy.

Contrastingly, mindfulness meditation focuses generally on body sensations. The point of mindfulness is to consciously experience the ebb and flow of sensations in your body, because by consciously experiencing them, you transmute them into better feeling sensations.

For example, if you sit with your anger and, like spiritual teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says, “boil it like a potato,” it will eventually dissolve or transform in some way, and all that will be left is lightness, contentment and calm.

The benefits of mindfulness meditation are that you can allow negative sensations to leave your body and be replaced by better-feeling sensations. Over time this means you become happier, more capable of experiencing joy, and more loving.