Meditation and Mindfulness
Overview
Incorporating "mindfulness" and "meditation" into one's daily life can have a significant impact on both physical and mental health. This section of the Counseling and Wellness Center website is dedicated to providing knowledge and resources about these practices to help you get started. For information about the Counseling and Wellness Center's weekly meditation group, please see the "Quicklinks" below.
What is Meditation? What is Mindfulness?
These are great questions that are not easily answered. Meditation and mindfulness have been practiced since ancient times and as such have been utilized in so many varied, forms that it's impossible to give one clear and concise definition of what meditation or mindfulness look like. In the broadest sense, meditation is "a family of self-regulation practices that focus on training attention and awareness in order to bring mental processes under greater voluntary control and thereby foster general mental well-being and development and/or specific capacities such as calm, clarity, and concentration. (Walsh & Shapiro, 2006). Mindfulness can be generally defined as a "state of active, open attention on the present. When you're mindful, you observe your thoughts and feelings from a distance, without judging them good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to experience. (Psychology Today, 2017)"
The Benefits of Meditation and Mindfulness
The health benefits of regular meditation practice can include stress and anxiety reduction, improved sleep, better interpersonal relationships, and better cognitive functioning (Headspace inc., 2017).
Empirically supported benefits of mindfulness include a reduction in rumination, stress reduction, boosts to working memory, improved focus, less emotional reactivity, more cognitive flexibility, more satisfaction in relationships and an overall improvement in self-insight. Other health benefits of mindfulness include increased immune functioning, improved well-being, increased information processing speed, and a reduction in psychological distress (apa.org).