The health benefits of meditation

Managing stress, especially if you’re

• anxious, tense or worried

• lowering blood pressure

• increasing self-awareness, patience, tolerance, imagination and creativity

• focusing on the present

• reducing negative emotions

• processing how to move forward

DING DING DING DING!

But that was nothing—the really trippy thing happened at the end. Nancy instructed us to sit up gently, keeping our eyes closed. When I did, I felt like I was huge, 10 times my normal size, sitting in this yoga studio with two other, normal-sized women.

“You just had a beautiful, expanded sense of self,” Nancy said. “This is a ‘self’ with a big S, not a little S.”

The big S “self” is not the ego but the sense that we’re bigger than our bodies, she said.

Class 2

This was my favorite experience of the three classes: At one point during the guided meditation, Nancy instructed us to find our wisdom center, another name for our intuition, which is usually in our hearts or chests. Everything in life is always changing, Nancy said, and our wisdom centers are a little place inside us that doesn’t change.

So there I laid, eyes closed, limbs splayed, sandbag on my gut, looking for the sensation of a light in my chest. Nothing.

Well, she did say it’s usually there, so I started doing a full body check. Feet? Nope. Legs? Nada. Shoulders? No. Head? Negative.

Well, I thought, I am a writer, so … Hands?

I sensed a blue, cone-shaped light saber shot out of each of my palms. The beams were a few feet long, and they sort of hovered just above my hands.

Wisdom centers can manifest themselves in different ways, Nancy said.

“To me, it’s just exploring more parts of our existence,” she said. “We are so much. We’re spiritual as well as physical.”

Class 3

This is what happened in my third meditation class: Not a single thing. My mind turned into a stray puppy, wandering everywhere, sniffing at every corner of my mind. At times, I didn’t even hear Nancy talking.

“That’s common,” Nancy said. “That happens even to people who’ve meditated for 60 years. Sometimes, the mind just doesn’t settle down.”

The thing to remember, she said, is that those times can be just as valuable as the meditations that result in colors and beams of energy shooting from our palms.

“You didn’t fail,” she said. “It’s just your experience with your mediation. While it wasn’t as exciting as the other ones, it’s still a meditation.” a

by Stacie Ball

If you’re like many people, you don’t want to kiss these sweet, summer days good-bye. Maybe you are looking for one last affordable and fun activity to do as a family before summer ends and the kids go back to school. Look no further. Here are 5 fun, local ways to close out summer with a bang!