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Understanding the Purpose of Meditation

It might not be what you think

Wendy Miller
4 min readAug 10, 2021
Photo by: Geber86 via Getty Images Signature

Many religions and philosophies advocate meditation. Meditation is also used as a tool in many activities and for self-help purposes. While all of these things might be rather disparate, the reasons for performing the meditation are rather similar.

Most of us feel we have a reasonable understanding of the practice of meditation, but many of us can’t really describe the actual purpose.

So let’s take a look at some of the benefits, or purposes, of meditation. There’s more than one and for you, it might be just one or it might be a combination of a few.

A meditative practice brings you many benefits:

1. It’s the one time your mind really gets a rest. Your mind is constantly active. It’s thinking about ten different things every 15 seconds. It’s telling you that you need a drink of water. It’s worrying about your date next Saturday and reminding you that you don’t have enough money in your bank account to pay your cable bill.

Sleep isn’t any better. In your dreams, you’re largely acting and behaving the same way you do while awake. You’re still worrying about the same stuff during your dreams. Sleep is great for resting your body, but it’s not as useful for resting your mind.

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Wendy Miller
Wendy Miller

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