Beginners Guide to Meditation, Part I: The Brain

Meditation is the mental practice where you focus on one thing in order to achieve a state of mindfulness; during this state, we experience mental and emotional clarity. The way meditation works and benefits the body is as following: your brain functions on five major wavelengths throughout the day, the higher the frequency, the more hyperactive your brain is. Through meditation, you lower the frequency into ideally a state of calmness. Before venturing into the actual practice of meditation, here is an explanation on the five wavelengths your brain works in:

• Gamma state: (30-100 Hz), this is the brains most hyperactive state and where it’s capable of retaining the most information. During this state your brain is extremely stimulated which makes it easy for you to remember and learn new things, it’s a behavior encouraged during presentations in order to ensure that the public remembers the content. However, if your brain is overstimulated during this state, you might end up falling into a state of anxiety.
• Beta State: (13-30 Hz) our standard thinking stage. During this frequency, our brain is analytical and assessing situations. I suppose you can referer to this state as the state of ‘reason’. Your brain should usually be during this frequency throughout the day.
• Alpha state: (9-13) at this frequency, your brain begins to slow down. During this state, you feel that your brain, and most likely your body as well, begin to relax and enter a state of tranquility. It’s usually associated with daydreaming and we achieve it by taking part in activities that encourage mindfulness like taking a walk, doing yoga or even driving through familiar routes.
• Theta state:  (4-8 Hz) Most people achieve this state during meditation. At this frequency, your brain decreases its thinking and increases your awareness and intuition making it easier to visualize and solve problems.
• Delta state (1-3 Hz): people usually reach this low level of frequency during a deep sleep. However, you can actually achieve this through meditation, but it usually requires a lot of experience.

Meditation is a practice that ends up giving you the ability to identify and control the state your mind is in and lower your brains wavelength. In the next part of this article we will look into different ways you can meditate, but until then why don’t you browse throughout our online library www.hublmedia.com for books that inspire you to pursue meditation.