How 5 minutes of meditation a day can save your life

Meditation of some form should become a regular part in your life. It combats many of the things that will lead you to an early grave.

Signs you need to meditate

If you are experiencing any of these things in your life then chances are you would benefit from a few minutes of meditation per day.

• you get regular headaches;
• you have trouble sleeping;
• you have trouble eating;
• you are eating too much;
• you are fighting with family members more often;
• you don’t want to go to work or other social events;
• you are gaining or losing weight;
• your sex drive is down;
• you are always tired;
• you are much quicker to get angry

This is not an exhaustive list but just a few things that you might be experiencing that might indicate you need to slow down and meditate.

Why these signs could be serious

The above listed signs could be dangerous to your health for many reasons. However, the main concern is the health problems that stress can create.
Stress has been scientifically proven to have an impact on a person’s wellbeing. Blood pressure is affected, weight gain or weight loss occurs which leads to other problems, and so on and so forth.
One of the best ways to stop these manifestations of stress and thus prevent all the symphony of health problems from occurring is to start meditating - even for only small amounts of time.

Proof meditation has amazing effects on the body

The Dalai Lama has been part of the Mind and Life conferences for many years. At these discussions many experts from different schools of thought (buddhism, science, philosophy, medicine, etc.) get together and talk about the profound impacts the mind is now known to have on the body.
However, the discussions took a different turn a few years ago when it was found that the buddhist yogis who have been meditating up in the mountains were able to do things that no one else can do. Two of the main examples were a monk who could comletely supress his physical response to a gun being fired next to his ear (he didn’t even flinch), and a group of yogis who can increase their core body temperature so high that they can dry wet sheets on their back!
Science began investigating these feats and found that the meditators brains functioned very differently to a normal person and the chemicals that create a feeling of happiness were much higher in their bodies.
Since these discoveries scientists have been working closely with the buddhists as it has become evident that they have a lot to teach. in regards to the power of the mind.

As I am always rambling on about, you are in control of your mind. People often fail to realize that the stress they are experiencing is taking place IN their mind so they have to USE their mind to reduce it. It is too difficult to try and fix everything that happens in your life such that you will never be stressed. A more practical solution is to learn to deal with the negative things when they happen. And that isn’t as hard as it sounds.

How to meditate to reduce stress

This is so easy you will wonder why you haven’t been doing it all your life.
First start by slowly turning your mind inwards so that instead of focussing on the external appearances of sight, smell, etc. you are looking at your thoughts. Become aware of them. How do they move? Where do they come from? Where do they go?
Do not try to change the thought. Do not judge “bad” thoughts and do not reward “good” thoughts. Just be aware of them. After some time you will be able to watch your thoughts quite easily without becoming distracted or frustrated.
Meditating in this way will allow you to be able to recognize thoughts when they first arise. This is a powerful tool in reducing stress as you realize that it is just a thought, not solid. By simply recognizing our thoughts we reduce their power and thus can reduce the effects they have on our life.
Conclusion
In anything you do during the day try to be aware of your thoughts. Let them come and go but be aware of them and their games. And, when you find a stressful thought just gently remind yourself it is just a thought that doesn’t have any power to effect you in any way at all. That’s the power of the mind!

Interesting facts and useless informations :)

Saturday mail delivery in Canada was eliminated by Canada Post on February 1, 1969! In Tokyo, a bicycle is faster than a car for most trips of less than 50 minutes! There are 18 different animal shapes in the Animal Crackers cookie zoo! Should there be a crash, Prince Charles and Prince William never travel on the same airplane as a precaution! Your body is creating and killing 15 million red blood cells per second! The king of hearts is the only king without a mustache on a standard playing card! There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos!   There is one slot machine in Las Vegas for every eight inhabitants!
	The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. It was the fashion in Renaissance Florence to shave them off!
Every day 20 banks are robbed. The average take is $2,500! The most popular first name in the world is Muhammad! Tablecloths were originally meant to be served as towels with which dinner guests could wipe their hands and faces after eating! Tourists visiting Iceland should know that tipping at a restaurant is considered an insult! One car out of every 230 made was stolen last year!   The names of Popeye's four nephews are Pipeye, Peepeye, Pupeye, and Poopeye! Until the nineteenth century, solid blocks of tea were used as money in Siberia! The Nobel Peace Prize medal depicts three naked men with their hands on each other's shoulders! When glass breaks, the cracks move faster than 3,000 miles per hour. To photograph the event, a camera must shoot at a millionth of a second! A Boeing 747 airliner holds 57,285 gallons of fuel! A car uses 1.6 ounces of gas idling for one minute. Half an ounce is used to start the average automobile!
	The Philadelphia mint produces 26 million pennies per day!
A lightning bolt generates temperatures five times hotter than those found at the sun's surface! A violin contains about 70 separate pieces of wood! It is estimated that 4 million "junk" telephone calls, phone solicitations by persons or programmed machine are made every day in the United States!   It takes glass one million years to decompose, which means it never wears out and can be recycled an infinite amount of times! Forest fires move faster uphill than downhill! Almost half the newspapers in the world are published in the United States and Canada!

The two-foot long bird called a Kea that lives in New Zealand likes to eat the strips of rubber around car windows! Most lipstick contains fish scales! Skepticisms is the longest word that alternates hands when typing! One ragweed plant can release as many as one billion grains of pollen! It's illegal to drink beer out of a bucket while you're sitting on a curb in St. Louis!
	The first product to have a bar code was Wrigleys gum!
No piece of square dry paper can be folded more than 7 times in half! A group of geese on the ground is a gaggle, a group of geese in the air is a skein! Over 2500 left handed people a year are killed from using products made for right handed people! There are more than 10 million bricks in the Empire State Building! If you counted 24 hours a day, it would take 31,688 years to reach one trillion! Taphephobia is the fear of being buried alive! A crocodile always grows new teeth to replace the old teeth!   The sun is 330,330 times larger than the earth! Clinophobia is the fear of beds! A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second!     Porcupines float in water! Pinocchio is Italian for "pine eye"! The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog." uses every letter of the alphabet! The average life span of a major league baseball is 5-7 pitches! The Mint once considered producing doughnut-shaped coins! The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable"! The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds!

The sloth (a mammal) moves so slowly that green algae can grow undisturbed on its fur! Cat urine glows under a black-light! The world's termites outweigh the world's humans 10 to 1! The electric chair was invented by a dentist! Windmills always turn counter-clockwise. Except for the windmills in Ireland! A hedgehog's heart beats 300 times a minute on average! Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand!   The placement of a donkey's eyes in its head enables it to see all four feet at all times! Human teeth are almost as hard as rocks! A mole can dig a tunnel 300 feet long in just one night! Ancient Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone! A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside! A quarter has 119 grooves on its edge, a dime has one less groove!
	Hummingbirds can weigh less than a penny!!
Until 1796, there was a state in the United States called Franklin. Today it's known as Tennessee! The Earth weighs around 6,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons (5,940 billion billion metric tons)! A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off - it dies from starvation! Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie! The average person has over 1,460 dreams a year!   It's against the law to pawn your dentures in Las Vegas! One in every 4 Americans has appeared on television! The average American/Canadian will eat about 11.9 pounds of cereal per year! It's against the law to burp, or sneeze in a certain church in Omaha, Nebraska! you're born with 300 bones, but when you get to be an adult, you only have 206! Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete! Over 10,000 birds a year die from smashing into windows! The state of Florida is bigger than England! There are more than one million animal species on Earth! In Natoma, Kansas, it's illegal to throw knives at men wearing striped suits It was once against the law to have a pet dog in a city in Iceland!   Your heart beats over 100,000 times a day! Thomas Edison, lightbulb inventor, was afraid of the dark!