Becoming more still within not only helps you to feel more at ease, contented and peaceful, it is also good for your body and has many health benefits.

Here are some of the main benefits that practicing stillness brings: 

  • As you become more physically and emotionally relaxed, the heart rate slows, the blood flow increases and the respiratory rate decreases. So it is good for your heart, lungs and overall well-being.
  • Stress takes a heavy toll on the body. Cultivating more presence and serenity in your daily life helps you to prevent or treat many stress-related ailments, including headaches, muscle tension, aches, etc.
  • Your immune system is strengthened. By bringing your conscious attention into your body, the body's inner energy field becomes stronger, making it less prone to illness. This also helps to speed up healing.
  • Stillness helps you to gradually become emotionally more stable and less prone to anxiety attacks, depression, mood swings, negative emotional patterns, etc.
  • Improved concentration. Through stillness, we begin to use our minds in a more focused and efficient manner, yet remain relaxed.
  • The regular practice of quieting the mind and relaxing the body results in higher blood levels of melatonin, a hormone that plays a key role in the regulation of sleep. In other words, you will be able to sleep much better and quicker.
  • As the mind becomes quieter, your natural creativity and spontaneity grows. You become more creative in the widest sense of the word: Without trying, the appropriate action, the right answer, the new idea, just springs forth from within.
On a purely physiological level, the effects of a regular practice of meditation and stillness has been the subject of many rigorous scientific studies. For example, a 1999 study published in Psychosomatic Medicine showed that people who practiced meditation had lower blood pressure after meditating that the control group did. In 2004, the American Journal of Hypertension featured the results of a study showing significant lowering of blood pressure in a group of meditators compared to a control group who didn't meditate.

You may be interested in reading the story behind Stillness Buddy.