How Meditation Helps Depression

“Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.”
- Voltaire

“A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying that it needs work.”
- Geoffrey Norman

The current research in the scientific world is proving what for centuries, if not millennia, mystics have been saying all along, that meditation is a key step in the process of purifying the body, mind, and spirit. When we examine the power that meditation has over the spirit, the spirit’s influence over the mind, and then the mind’s influence over mental and physical health, it is made plain to us the interconnectedness of all aspects of the complete person. It has long been accepted that we are what we eat, could it also be that we are what we think? How many times do we feel ourselves stuck in psychological patterns, victims to our own emotional addictions? I believe that meditation can have and does have a profound affect on the physical, emotional, and spiritual well being of all individuals. After having experienced periods of mental duress and depression in recent years, I turned to meditation and now yoga to aid me in taking charge of my mind. I will examine the way that our thoughts can affect our mind and body in addition to our spirit by discussing current trends in neuroscience. Then I will explore one example of how meditation is being used by psychologists to break these patterns using a technique called Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. Finally I will discuss my own experience with depression, and how exploring my own spirituality and meditation practice aided me in understanding myself better and then finally gaining control over my life again.