Integrating the Brain with Meditation

Is Your Brain Fragmented?

It is a well-known fact that how we think affects everything we do in life – health, wealth, relationships, and achievements. Successful people are positive thinkers and they have positive states of mind. In contrast, most ordinary people remain grooved in a cycle of negative thinking and beliefs. This they take as “normal” state of their mind. However, in reality negative thinking and attitudes reflect a feeble mind – a mind that is not well developed or is fragmented. This is the status of people whose brains are highly lateralized, ie, dominated by either left or the right brain hemisphere.

On the contrary, people with well-developed mind have their brain hemispheres well integrated operating as an integrated whole unit. This automatically facilitates a balanced and clear thinking. A person with synchronized brain hemispheres is unlikely to fall prey to negative thinking, pessimism, or depression.

Do You Use or Abuse Your Brain?

Most people use their brain in a lop-sided manner – they either use more of their left or the right hemisphere. This is a chronic state called brain lateralization. This imbalance creates a reality filter that deprives much of life’s richness, a primary cause of unhappiness. When the brain hemispheres function out of sync it leads to diminishing energy, awareness, and joy.

The good news is: it is possible to rectify this hemispheric imbalance. The hemispheres are synchronized when they begin to work together, communicate faster, and resonate at the same frequencies. When this happens, new neural connections form between the two hemispheres, resulting in what is called whole brain functioning. In fact, such synchronization is present at times of intense clarity, creativity, joyful inspirations, and peak performance. These incredible happenings have been observed on electroencephalograph (EEG) recordings. The conclusion is:

Whole Brain is certainly Better Than Two Halves!

Meditation Unifies All Parts of the Brain

Meditation has been the traditional method of facilitating brain hemispheric integration. Accessing deeper states of consciousness and lowering brainwave frequencies directly correlate with higher levels of whole brain functioning. As meditation progresses, the brainwave patterns progressively move from the general waking state of beta wave to alpha (alert and relaxed state) to Theta (creativity and healing) to finally to Delta (formless meditation) state.

Meditation is no longer an obscure practice and more and more people are learning it and injecting inner peace and balance in their lives. For example, Vipassana (mindfulness) meditation has become popular throughout the world.  People who can not find much time take recourse to lessons and instructions in digital forms. There is a novel way to meditate: in the form of brainwave entrainment audios for people who think that they don’t have much mental discipline to learn meditation in the regular way.

Research has established that during deep meditation, blood flow to the frontal lobe and parietal lobe is reduced. The frontal lobe is the seat of our intellect, reasoning power and thinking; it enables us to plan and anticipate the future. It is here that human emotions like guilt, pride, sympathy, wonder, and compassion and generated. On the other hand, the parietal lobe processes the sensory data from the external world and connects us to the surroundings. It is also responsible for our sense of time and space. Under stress, both the frontal and parietal lobes operate in frantic pace or in fight-or-flight mode.

During deep meditation, the activities of the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe are practically stopped and the sensory signals from them, which cause anxieties and stress, are not transmitted to other parts of the brain, including those responsible for primary emotions of fear, sadness, anger, and aggressiveness. The deactivation of the parietal lobe detaches the meditators from the sense of time and space or the external world and induces a feeling of timelessness and oneness without any boundaries. The deactivation of frontal lobe results in dissipating worries and anxieties as well as the “me-ness” with its psychological baggage, which is bothersome and nagging. All these factors bring about deep tranquility of mind. This is the situation when we have “whole brain functioning.”

How to Learn Mindfulness Effectively

Brainwave Entrainment Audios for Meditation

Brainwave audios provides ordinary people the opportunity to experience the entire range of mental states and convert their highly lopsided or lateralized brain into an integrated single entity functioning as a whole. Using brainwave audios for relaxation is becoming quite common now – given the stressful life we lead. There are several other ways to get benefits from this technology as indicated in the references at the end of the article.

Brainwave entrainment recordings allow anyone to meditate simply by playing the audio. These audios have brainwave entrainment beats that can take the brain to brainwave states conducive to deeper meditation. The more a person meditates using the recordings the more his or her brain will heal from a state of fragmentation to wholeness. It results in clearer thinking, deeper feelings, and integrated functioning from a higher state frequency consciousness.

Read Further

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