General News
31 July, 2025
Meditation and Relaxation
Finding your Inner Connection with counsellor Vainney McAllister.
If there was one practice that I’d recommend to anyone who wants to improve their health and overall quality of life, the answer is simple… meditation.
Meditation is essentially all about creating and then maintaining an alert, but calm state of consciousness - where the mind is aware while the body is relaxed.
Due to generous funding, I am able to offer, for free, a chance to see if meditation is for you. Join me for an hour a week, for six weeks, to take some time out for yourself and experience the benefits that meditation may have for you.
This age-old practice is now proven to be extremely beneficial to your mental and physical health. The ancients used it regularly to achieve a better sense of balance and control in their lives - and to heal disease and dis-ease.
Harvard Medical School has studied the impact of meditation/mindfulness on the human brain since 2014, and they have made some remarkable discoveries.
“Studying an array of folks from different lifestyles, backgrounds, and ages, they’ve found that meditation is extremely helpful for those with chronic pain, depression, and anxiety disorders”.
Other studies have shown that it reduces blood pressure, helps to decrease the effects of inflammatory disorders as well as premenstrual syndrome, and menopausal symptoms.
While increasing energy, boosting the immune system and creating resilience to stress.
Mental Benefits
Since a large part of meditation is about learning to control the mind, it’s no surprise that many of the outcomes directly affect our mental state of being, in a positive way. Some of these recorded results are that it enhances your brain function, including the ability to focus, better memory, better cognitive skills, improvement in problem solving, decision making, and more creativity, as well as the development of intuition, and the ability to ignore distractions.
Recent research from more than 160 different studies shows that meditation increases grey matter in the brain, (in areas related to memory and thought) while also changing the brain in a way that has an overall positive effect on anxiety, stress, and depression.
It has been shown to increase serotonin production, so it can be said that meditating can actually boost your mood, your behaviour, and your general level of contentedness.
Research shows that consistent meditation (every day for at least five weeks) has the power to calm your nervous system, balance your stress hormones, even if your mindfulness practice is only 20 minutes long.
Meditating for 30 minutes a day has been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease and Alzheimer’s, as well as reducing the decline in some other degenerative diseases.
Meditation could become a daily medicine if viewed as a part of daily hygiene… like brushing your teeth.
This is general advice only.
