How Has Meditation Become Nearly as Popular as Yoga?

“Meditation deepens your awareness and helps you respond to your thoughts and feelings with more patience and kindness.”

Jude Johnson, YogaVibes Instructor

For starters, there’s a growing body of research, national media attention and major corporations like Google and Aetna who offer mediation classes because they improve employee health and decrease company costs. It also doesn’t hurt that professional, Olympic and college athletes have started meditation practices in efforts to improve their performance. 

According to a survey by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, meditation tripled in use from 2012-2017, making the practice just slightly less popular than yoga.   

Maybe more people are flocking to meditation because they’re looking for effective ways to combat the stress epidemic we have in our society.  We all face stress at times. Stress over work, finances, relationships, body image, traffic, time pressures, illnesses, and a plethora of negative headlines.  We’re juggling competing demands at home, work or both and need skills that will help us live in the present moment instead of being fixated on the future or the past.

While there are many activities that can improve your health, one of the simplest and most effective strategies for learning to live in the present moment is through meditation. Regular meditation practice is like doing pushups for your mind because it rewires your brain to become more resilient, resourceful and creative.  Meditation can help you learn to respond to stress with a greater sense of ease and peace of mind. 

Research on meditation has shown to improve :

  • mood
  • sleep
  • immune system
  • concentration, memory, creativity & learning ability

The simplest way to understand meditation is to think of it as brain training. It’s an opportunity to actively see what’s on your mind without trying to fix or solve every thought that pops into your head.  Like any discipline, there’s a fair amount of resistance at the beginning, because you’re not familiar with the practice.  

People avoid or give up on meditation because they think that it’s about stopping their thoughts. Meditation does not stop your thoughts because your brain is designed to generate thoughts.  Meditation is the practice of staying with an object, like breathing, and then noticing your thoughts come and go. The more you practice, the less bothered you are by your thoughts and sensory experiences.  Meditation deepens your awareness and helps you respond to your thoughts and feelings with more patience and kindness.  

Consider practicing meditation even if for short periods of time for the next 30-60 days. Do your best to suspend your judgment on whether or not the practice is helping or not.  It is normal to be skeptical but don’t let this stop your practice. Many of us practice meditation a few times and assume we are doing it wrong because we don’t feel any differently. We notice more change over the course of time than we do in our day to day lives. 

To practice with Jude, check out his six day Mindfulness Meditation for Beginners Experience.

Jude Johnson, MA, LMFT | Meditation | Training | Psychotherapy