Why Meditation Is Really a Group Activity
Just because you’re in your own head doesn’t mean you have to go it alone. (Photo: Getty Images).
Of all of the things I’ve learned in my years as a health editor, nothing has changed my life as significantly as learning to meditate (I’m trained in a technique called Transcendental Meditation). As I wrote about in my book 20 Pounds Younger, TM changed my entire demeanor, so much so that friends started asking me if I’d done something different with my hair!
Almost from the start, I noticed something strange: The times when I meditated with other people — my coach, friends, or a small group meditation held at The David Lynch Foundation, where I was taught — I went deeper, felt less antsy, and transcended more often.
Related: How Meditation Can Improve Your Career
As it turns out, my experiences weren’t anomalies. The website About Meditation talks about the “Buddha field,” which is “a field of consciousness that develops when everyone comes together with the same intention.”
Mallika Chopra, author of Living With Intent, has written that “while meditation is fundamentally about self-exploration, the coherence from meditating with others makes it personally and socially more powerful. While some are skeptical, there have been numerous studies that have shown that a large group of people meditating together has a measurable effect on the greater population.”
Sign me up! Actually, we can all sign up … for a massive group meditation.
Mallika’s father, Deepak, and my friend Gabrielle Bernstein, a best-selling spiritual author, are leading a global meditation for compassion with this stated mission: to gather more than 500,000 people online from nearly every country with one common intention — to turn around the rising tide of disconnection in the world and, through renewed empathy and love, reconnect to what truly matters.
Related: 4 Easy Ways to Build Meditation Into Your Day
While you may not experience the so-called “Buddha field” through the Internet, I believe that a group meditation at this scale has to generate some extra positivity in the universe. And nothing is stopping you from throwing a meditation party at your place. Just saying.
The event is on July 11 and you can sign up for the live stream here.
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