Being stressed out can cause real problems in your professional life as well as your personal life. Stress can influence you health in harmful ways.
Studies at Carnegie Mellon University and other institutions have shown that stress can be related 
to hair loss, depression and even cardiovascular disease. Researchers are claiming that stress can be as serious as heart disease.
When you experience stress, your body releases adrenaline. This raises your heart rate, increases your blood pressure, and gives you a boost of stressed-out energy. Your body also releases Cortisol. This is a stress hormone, which releases glucose into your blood stream. It changes the way your immune system responds, stunts your digestive system, reproductive system, and more. That’s because those things are not needed during a fight or flight response.
You can learn to manage stress with meditation practices.
Manage Stress with Meditation Practices
It is well known that one of the ways to really free yourself from the vicious cycle of stress is to use meditation for stress management.
Meditation is a great way to find a way of harmonizing your body and mind and letting go of your problems. Through meditation, we can put our lives into some sense of perspective, and attain a sense of relaxation and detachment from the things which are bothering us. When we meditate, our mind ‘resets’ itself to a simpler, more liberated setting which many people find helps massively with putting their lives in some sort of order, increasing their productivity and efficiency, and making life a little more manageable and enjoyable.
This article introduces a simple way to manage stress with meditation practices: listening to music.
One of the ways many people are using meditation for stress management is with the use of meditative music. Meditative music is intelligently engineered to put your mind into a state of relaxation and emptiness, quickly, easily and without the months of training and effort which goes into independent meditation practices.
With meditative music, you can simply lie on your bed or sit upright in a comfortable chair, let the music and soundscapes wash over your body and mind and help ease and soothe you into a more relaxing state of being. The music will coax your mind into a meditative mode, filling your body and spirit with induced relaxation, and all you need to do is let go and concentrate only on your breathing and the blissful feeling of meditation which you can begin to feel almost instantly.
As you have seen, stress can be very damaging to your health. It would be good if you would take steps to mitigate the stress in your life. You might try eliminating fast food, daily exercise and 9 minute meditation.
If you want your friends to also reduce the stress in their lives, please share this with them.
Beware of wasting your time. Not all meditation practices are the same. Listening to meditative music relaxes, but does not lead your mind to transcendental consciousness, the fourth state of consciousness (after waking, dreaming, and sleeping).
Yes, there are scientific results. But they do not apply to all forms of meditation. The gyrification results (development of deeper folds of the brain) were done on practitioners of Mindfulness meditation. Over 600 studies have been done on Transcendental Meditation, the most effective and therefore most studied form of meditation. What little research has been done on relaxation shows that it produces only superficial or short-lived results, mostly just peacefulness.
I hope this helps your readers. For information on Transcendental Meditation (TM), please visit tm dot org. For information on the low-cost alternative for learning transcending, Natural Stress Relief (NSR), visit nsrusa dot org.
Transcending is subtle, so it must be learned from a skilled, specially trained teacher. It is effortless, natural. Transcending makes use of the natural tendency of the mind to think thoughts and to follow those thoughts and experiences that are the most charming. Pure awareness is the most charming possible experience, so transcending happens almost by itself, effortlessly.
Regular practice of transcending eliminates stress, leaving us refreshed. The long-term benefits include the prevention and reversal of stress-related disease and the growth of balance, creativity, intelligence, joy, and the ability to love.
David Spector, President, Natural Stress Relief/USA
David:
I appreciate your comments on this post.
As I mentioned, this was just a quick meditation for anxiety.
While I agree with you that it may not lead to transcendence, it is good for some who is about to give a presentation to his or her boss to settle down before the anxiety provoking event.
I’ve know about TM for umteen years, but have never studied it in detail.
Please just tell me one thing about the mantra. Is there one mantra for all people or does each person get his or her own mantra?
When Swami Rama gave me my mantra years ago, I felt like it was an individual mantra. I later learned that it is fairly common. Nonetheless, I used it for many years and remember vividly a transcendental experience I had with it in the Arkansas mountains.
Thanks for your feedback.
Jerome
Dear Jerome,
I happened upon your reply by accident. This website doesn’t send email when a reply is posted.
You say, “While I agree with you that it may not lead to transcendence, it is good for some who is about to give a presentation to his or her boss to settle down before the anxiety provoking event.”
Well, yes, but this is only relaxation. The benefits that people who actually learn transcending receive are as different as travel in a jet plane is different from travel by roller skates.
If you are going to suggest that people try meditation, teach them that transcending techniques are far more effective than the others. This effectiveness is why scientists have conducted over 600 studies on the results of Transcendental Meditation (TM). The effectiveness is why the VA is currently studying the use of TM for returning veterans with PTSD. The effectiveness is why the David Lynch Foundation is spending millions to fund the teaching of TM to students, teachers, and staff in troubled high schools throughout the USA.
In Transcendental Meditation (TM), there is more than one mantra. However, it is not an infinite set, so it is quite possible for two students to receive the same mantra. In Natural Stress Relief (NSR), there actually is only one mantra given to everyone. It doesn’t matter in the slightest. I think you have fallen into the trap of believing that mantras have some special or magic powers. They don’t. They are only tools used as part of the practice of transcending. The important part, the part that makes transcending so remarkably effective, are the instructions given to the student for performing the practice. It is true that the instructions are simple and the practice is simple. But its effectiveness lies in the skill of the teacher to make the subtle easy to understand and easy to do.
Your experience in the mountains of Arkansas was undoubtedly a clear experience of transcendence, the pure fourth state of consciousness. But an isolated experience isn’t the whole story. When people learn transcending properly (via TM or NSR), they experience transcendence twice a day. True, the experience is not always as clear as yours was, due to the process of stress release, but the fact is that the instructions work, and they keep on working for a lifetime. The end result is complete freedom from stress and the development of a strong nervous system, with resulting unbounded peace, happiness, and clarity of thought.
David Spector
President,
Natural Stress Relief/USA
David:
I would love to learn more about Natural Stress ReliefUSA.
I’ll check out your website soon and be in touch.
Thanks,
Jerome