To raise awareness about meditation and its benefits, the General Assembly declared 21 December as World Meditation Day.It reflects the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.
The UNGA has declared World Meditation Day through a resolution introduced by Liechtenstein and co-sponsored by India, alongside Sri Lanka, Nepal, Mexico, Andorra, and other nations. This decision recognizes the importance of meditation as a tool for achieving inner peace and fostering holistic well-being.
The resolution comes at a critical juncture as the world grapples with increasing stress, anxiety, and conflicts. The Indian mission at the UN underscored the relevance of meditation in modern times, emphasizing its roots in ancient traditions and its role in addressing contemporary challenges. Meditation fosters harmony between mind and body, individuals and communities, and humanity and nature, offering a holistic approach to achieving peace.
Scientific research reinforces the benefits of meditation, revealing its potential to reduce stress, improve cognitive functions, and enhance physical health. By recognizing these scientifically proven advantages, the UN resolution encourages people across the globe to incorporate meditation into their lives, promoting a collective journey toward inner balance and emotional resilience.
Meditation is an ancient practice that involves focusing one’s attention on the present moment. Rooted in religious, yogic, and secular traditions across cultures, meditation has been practiced for thousands of years. Today, it is embraced worldwide, transcending its spiritual origins to become a universal tool for personal well-being and mental health.
There are different types of meditation, each offering unique approaches to achieving calm, clarity, and balance. Research underscores its ability to reduce stress, improve focus and emotional balance, alleviating anxiety and depression, and enhance sleep quality. It also contributes to better physical health, including lowering blood pressure and managing pain.
Technology has further expanded access to meditation, with apps and online platforms enabling individuals to practice anywhere and anytime.
Beyond individual benefits, meditation fosters empathy, collaboration, and a sense of shared purpose, contributing to collective well-being. Celebrated for its universality, meditation is practiced across all regions of the world by people of all ages, backgrounds, and lifestyles.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes the significant benefits of meditation, particularly mindfulness meditation. WHO’s discussions on stress management underscore the importance of learning coping mechanisms, such as meditation, to support mental and physical well-being.
According to WHO, meditation can be a powerful self-care tool to support treatment and enhance overall well-being, particularly in managing symptoms of anxiety. Incorporating mindfulness meditation into your daily routine, even for just a few minutes, can help you achieve a sense of calm and focus.
Additionally, WHO acknowledges the mental health benefits of practices like yoga, which often incorporate meditative elements. On the International Day of Yoga, WHO highlighted yoga’s contributions to lifelong health and well-being, emphasizing its role in promoting healthier populations and a more equitable and sustainable world.
Meditation is increasingly recognized for its contributions to mental health — a fundamental human right — and its alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development emphasize health and well-being as central to achieving sustainable development. Goal 3, “Good Health and Well-Being,” aims to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages, addressing key challenges such as maternal and child health, communicable and non-communicable diseases, and access to essential medicines and vaccines. This target also highlights the importance of mental health, universal health coverage, and the reduction of health inequities to build resilient and inclusive societies.
Some still have confusion on understanding Meditation and Yoga.
Historically and traditionally, yoga refers to a wide range of practices including personal and interpersonal behaviour, body movement exercises, breathing techniques and meditative practices. Yoga was primarily marketed to the fitness industry which was just beginning to develop at the time. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that most westerners today think of yoga as body movement and not much else.
As Yoga is an umbrella that encompasses so much more than body movement, we need to be careful to distinguish it from other forms of exercise by indicating the component of self-inquiry that is involved: Yoga is not just movement for movement’s sake, it’s movement for the sake of deeper understanding, broader acceptance, heightened intelligence and more adapted instincts.
Just as there are many different ways of understanding yoga, there are equally as many ways of understanding meditation. For some, meditation refers to an activity of silent sitting, either guided by a teacher or not. For others, meditation is a quality of being that can be done during any activity, whether that’s driving a car, peeling an onion, doing the laundry, running a marathon, giving birth, leading a meeting or practicing yoga.
As we recognise, both yoga and meditation are disciplines that can go hand in hand, and to understand the similarities between them, we must review what they are and what they entail.
Yoga -although in recent years has gained prominence for its benefits in the field of fitness- is a practice with more than 5000 years of history . In Bigyan Bhairav Tantra, believed to be 5,000 years old, there is the description of 112 techniques of meditation. With the practice of this discipline, the combination and synchronization between body and mind is worked through different postures -or asanas- and breathing techniques. In addition, during yoga practices, meditations are often introduced.
Current meditation practices have their origins in certain Asian religions and spiritual traditions, and are believed to help bring greater awareness and acceptance of one’s life by widening awareness and removing conditioning of the mind. Meditation is an ideal practice for those seeking to learn to live in the present and become less immersed in their thoughts. In fact, it is believed that by achieving a deep state of relaxation, one can improve both a person’s health and well-being. (R P Narayan)