December 4, 2023

3 Reasons to Try Meditation

About Katie Neal

Content Manager

Katie Neal is a former Parade magazine editor who was lucky enough to interview two of her idols — Jimmy Carter and Taylor Swift —before pivoting to a career in marketing. Now she leads content strategy and engagement for Brookdale Senior Living.

In our webinar series, Sharon Salzberg, meditation teacher and bestselling author of Real Happiness: A 28-Day Program to Realize the Power of Meditation, explained how the practice of meditation has improved her life, and the benefits it can offer to adults of all ages. Spoiler alert: It’s never too late to start.

“I started meditating when I was 18, which was young, and my teachers always said, and I didn’t appreciate it at the time: It’s easier if you’re a little older,” Salzberg says. “You’ve seen some life. You’ve probably had to let go of some stuff…. You’ve absorbed the truth of change in your body.”

Though Salzberg went to India to study meditation as a college student, she explained that for her, it’s not merely a spiritual practice, but a practical skills training that may be able to help increase a person’s ability to navigate the complexities of life.

“I look at meditation…as being a major way [to build] that sense of resource to meet life wherever it is presenting,” she says.

In case you missed it, here are three of her top reasons to give meditation a try.

Practice concentrating

By engaging in skills like meditation, which requires focused awareness on the breath, you’re working a mental muscle that may be especially useful in today’s world full of distractions—whether they be social media feeds or competing caregiving needs. Exercising that discipline over and over, she says, may make it easier to “course correct” when, in our daily lives, we find our attention wandering.

Mindfulness

The term has come to meet a lot of things, Salzberg says, but this is her preferred definition:

“’Mindfulness’ is a word that can mean many things, I use it to mean an empowered awareness where we can see our experience as it is.”

Instead of getting swept away by our emotions—for example, thinking we’ll be suffering from an ache or pain forever, or that we have it so much worse than other people—mindfulness can help us to contextualize our feelings and understand that the moment will likely pass.

Meditation helps us practice investigating our thoughts without being carried away by them. “We [can] see the sensation or the feeling or the thought early on, not after we have acted on it,” Salzberg says, like firing off an angry email or text to someone we disagree with.

Better connections

It’s not hard to see how being less reactive and more focused in our lives might positively impact our relationships. But meditation can also help us cultivate a deeper connection to ourselves, Salzberg says, and practicing self-compassion and kindness may ultimately help to foster more authentic connections with others.

Meditation, though a solitary activity, may lead us to “listen better to others… to be kinder, more compassionate, rather than maybe so judgey,” she adds, “and be willing to be surprised by others.”

That can create a ripple effect that strengthens relationships in many aspects of our lives.

Learn more about Salzberg's teachings on her website.