Sahaja Benefits

Benefits You Can Expect with Sahaja Meditation Practice:

• Stress and Anxiety Relief
• Ability to Stay Calm and Non-reactive
• Relaxation
• Improved Attention and Focus
• Better Overall Emotional Health
• Long-term and Sustained Resilience
• Improved Sleep Quality
• Many Physical Health Improvements
• Increased Emotional Intelligence
• Ability to Focus Energy on Holistic Healing
• Increased Sense of Higher Purpose and Spirituality
• Increased Skills for Career Advancement and Professional Success

How Can You Experience These Benefits?

By signing up with Sahaja Online, you can learn highly-effective meditation techniques in the comfort of your own home.

Live, instructor-led sessions, will teach you how to activate and use your inner, subtle energy system (the Kundalini energy and associated energy centers or chakras). This meditation method is simple and does not involve significant cognitive effort, heavy concentration or challenging mind techniques.

The elevation of your consciousness to a higher state, where you can experience a deep sense of calm and be without thoughts, is almost effortless. All the benefits of Sahaja meditation flow from regularly experiencing this state known as Thoughtless Awareness, which is absolutely unique to Sahaja.

Our guided meditation sessions and a supportive community help you establish a regular practice quickly.

The benefits you get from your meditation sessions are directly related to the time and focus you devote to your daily practice, and the extent of guidance you’re ready to receive from our expert instructors.

Some benefits, like relief from stress and anxiety, you’ll realize almost immediately. Other benefits, like increased resiliency, and improvements to sleep quality, will occur gradually over time with continued practice.

You also have the benefit of requesting one-on-one coaching to help you develop a customized meditation routine, and stay on track.

Your journey to healing and self-improvement starts on the very first day of your practice, and you can focus your sessions on what’s most important to you.

Immediate Benefits

Stress and Anxiety Relief

You can experience relief from stress and anxiety almost immediately after beginning your Sahaja meditation practice. You will develop an increased ability to exercise attentional control (i.e. control over what you focus your attention on) as well as cognitive control (i.e. control over your thoughts and feelings).

Meditation positively influences key neurochemicals involved in your automatic stress response. Scientific studies confirm that Sahaja meditation’s state of Thoughtless Awareness has a therapeutic effect.

With Sahaja meditation, you are better able to introspect, address, and resolve the distress caused by negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. This improved ability to cope with adverse events reduces anxiety and improves self-perceived quality of your life.

If you are suffering from anxiety disorders, Sahaja meditation can be especially effective for managing symptoms such as irrational fear, apprehensiveness and dread.

Staying Calm and Non-Reactive

Sahaja meditation allows you to pay objective, nonjudgmental, nonreactive attention to all aspects of your daily experience, both internal and external. This helps you decrease your emotional reactivity and flush negative feelings.

Your sympathetic nervous system controls impulses to move, act, or respond, and is the most impacted by anxiety, fear, fatigue, and depression. During Sahaja meditation, you’ll train yourself to inhibit these impulses to achieve an increased sense of calm and well-being.

You’ll learn to let your thoughts and feelings rise and fall, while you calmly observe them without reaction or judgment. Learning how to unlink your actions from your impulses, helps relieve negative physiological effects from stress, and may ultimately have much deeper implications for healing.

Relaxation

Sahaja meditation elicits the relaxation response, during the earliest phase of the meditation session by reducing activity in the paralimbic brain regions. These regions control arousal of the sympathetic nervous system and influence physical relaxation.

This early benefit goes hand-in-hand with reducing stress, anxiety and emotional reactivity, which are all easy to achieve rather quickly once you begin your meditation practice.

Improved Attention and Focus

Meditation produces structural changes in your brain that enhance attention, perception and focus.

Even when you’re not actively meditating, you’ll be able to keep sustained focus, ignore distractions and process a greater amount of information, while maintaining emotional perspective.

With experience, you’ll learn how to activate and deactivate specific regions of your brain at will, to improve attention, cognitive control, and overall mental health.

Better Emotional Health

Neurochemicals play a major role in your emotional health. They work with your nervous system and send messages to your brain that influence your emotional state.

The messages your brain receives can have a dramatic effect on your behavior, health and overall happiness. At any given moment, millions of chemical reactions can be taking place in your brain.

Meditation, by its very nature, has a built-in ability to function as an emotional regulator. It can increase messages sent by key neurochemicals that keep you feeling positive and resilient, while strengthening your ability to inhibit negative emotions and thoughts.

Meditation Increases Your Levels of These Neurochemicals:

• GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid)— This neurochemical’s chief role is to reduce excitability throughout the nervous system. The result is a calming, anti-anxiety effect. It also regulates the activity of other key neurochemicals, such as serotonin, norepinephrine, epinephrine and dopamine. Low levels of GABA are associated with anxiety, insomnia, and persistent worrying.

• Dopamine— Commonly understood to elevate mood and produce feelings of pleasure, dopamine plays several other important roles as well. In addition to stimulating feel-good, calming endorphins, it also helps regulate attention, and motor activity and modulates reward-motivation circuitry, which is tied to addiction, cravings and other impulses. Low levels of dopamine are associated with depression, fatigue, mood swings and an inability to concentrate.

• Serotonin— A natural mood stabilizer, and directly involved in regulating sleep cycles and circadian rhythm. Serotonin also helps modulate pain, appetite, body temperature, and blood pressure. It affects endocrine system secretion, information processing (learning and memory) and sexual behavior. Low levels of serotonin are associated with an increase in impulsive behavior, depression and aggression.

• Melatonin— Responsible for promoting healthy sleeping and waking patterns, melatonin also stimulates immunity, decelerates aging and reduces pain sensitivity. It supports the body’s antioxidative defense system to protect against free radicals and cell damage. Melatonin also promotes positive mood and mood stabilization. Low levels of melatonin are associated with sleep disorders, moodiness, and an increased sensitivity to stress.

• Acetylcholine— Regulates attention and states of consciousness. During meditation, increased levels of acetylcholine result in enhanced attention and focus, with diminished awareness of distracting sensory input. It is also involved in learning, perception, cognition, and memory consolidation. Low levels of acetylcholine are associated with cognitive decline, mood disorders and learning disabilities.

• Glutamate—Enhances electrical flow among brain cells, and is involved in motivation, learning, memory and brain plasticity. Low levels of glutamate are associated with difficulty concentrating, insomnia and depleted energy.

• Arginine vasopressin — Roles played by this neurochemical include regulating water balance and blood pressure within the body. It is related to learning and memory consolidation and increased arousal. It helps decrease self-perceived fatigue and mediates oxytocin in social behavior. Low levels are associated with dehydration, low blood pressure, and some forms of diabetes.

• Beta-endorphins — This neurochemical is a natural opiate, and painkiller. It also produces an increased sense of happiness and well-being. It reduces blood pressure, depresses respiration, and decreases fear. Low levels of beta-endorphins are associated with low self-esteem, depression and sugar cravings.

Meditation Decreases Your Levels of These Neurochemicals:

• Norepinephrine — Decreases fearfulness and anxiety. Helps prevent vasoconstriction, and decreases blood pressure, heart rate, and blood sugar level. It also modulates arousal, and mood. High levels of norepinephrine are associated with elevated blood pressure, anxiety, and hyperactivity.

• Epinephrine— Also known as adrenaline, this neurochemical relaxes the sympathetic nervous system, decreasing the fight-or-flight responses, such as heart rate, glucose levels, and blood pressure. High levels of epinephrine are associated with anxiety, insomnia and increased fear and aggression.

• Cortisol — Commonly known for its direct link to the stress response, cortisol accelerates aging and decreases immunity. It also helps regulate glucose and metabolism and can help heal inflammation. High levels of cortisol are associated with high blood pressure, reduced libido, and carbohydrate cravings.

• Adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH)— The primary function of this hormone is to regulate cortisol levels. It helps decrease the fight-or-flight stress response. High levels of ACTH are associated with hormonal disorders such as Cushings syndrome.

With a regular meditation practice, you’ll be actively promoting an internal chemical balance, both naturally and holistically, and experience the benefits of better health.

Longer Term and Deeper Health Benefits

AD/HD

Sahaja meditation sharpens attention and focus and helps people with AD/HD take control of their lives. Our meditation programs are offered to students in schools across the United States, with the goal of boosting physical health and mental resilience. Studies have suggested that around 70 percent of these students received significant, direct benefits, including enhanced attention and self-control.

Sahaja meditation may also be an effective in-home management tool for families with children who have AD/HD. In an Australian study, published in Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, parents and children participated in a 6-week program of twice-weekly Sahaja clinic sessions and regular meditation at home. Results showed improvements in the children’s AD/HD behaviors, as well as their self-esteem and the quality of their relationships. 

Long Term and Sustained Resilience

Neurophysiological studies have consistently shown that Sahaja meditation provides deep and lasting health benefits, and enables you to achieve long-term and sustained mental and physical resiliency to stressors.

How?

Sahaja meditation’s state of Thoughtless Awareness has been found to evoke unique patterns of neurophysiological activity in brain regions associated with emotional regulation, heightened attentional skills, and enhanced brain plasticity.

The result is a more robust, long-term mind-body resilience, and an increased capacity to recover from challenges quickly.

You’ll experience stress management, not just stress relief.

Depression Relief

For many, Sahaja meditation can be an effective treatment for depression, typically as part of a comprehensive treatment approach.

The regular practice of Sahaja meditation helps you process and regulate emotions by teaching you how to control what you devote your attention to.

You’ll learn to exercise conscious control over your thoughts and feelings and develop the ability to pay impartial, nonjudgmental, nonreactive attention to all aspects of your experience. This helps diminish the sense of separateness, isolation or aloneness that tends to accompany depression.

Dealing with Addiction

Sahaja meditation can be an effective part of a complete addiction recovery plan. It helps relieve stress and stress-induced cravings, enhances overall emotional self-regulation, and provides a renewed sense of control. Emotional reactivity and impulsive actions are reduced, and compulsive, addiction-related behaviors are decreased.

Through meditation, you are better able to delink action from impulse. This allows you to rewire the neural circuits that are driving your surrender to the unhealthy impulses and cravings associated with addiction.

Sahaja meditation also promotes acceptance, tolerance and forgiveness for self and others, which is important for addiction recovery. It improves, self-esteem, self-respect and overall quality of life. It offers a positive lifestyle alternative, enhancing the capacity for resilient and healthy adaptation to a new lifestyle without addictions.

Improved Sleep

Sahaja meditation functions as a global auto regulator. It regulates autonomic functions (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure, respiration and body temperature), and positively influences key neurochemicals that are involved in getting a good night’s sleep, including melatonin, serotonin, GABA, cortisol, norepinephrine, epinephrine.

Meditation can provide a holistic way for you to improve the quality of your sleep.

Positive Long-Term Structural Changes in Your Brain

Studies show, that compared to the average person, the brain of a long-term meditator is better connected, better balanced, better synchronized, better organized and more efficient.

Meditation functions like “push-ups” for the brain, improving intelligence, reasoning, memory, creativity, learning, motivation and self-actualization.

It takes advantage of the brain’s natural plasticity to induce lasting changes in emotional processing. As an experienced meditator, you will have a quieter, calmer mind, even when idling in “default mode”- the brain’s natural standby mode.

Meditation alters consciousness in the frontal cortex, a region of the brain that can inhibit or exert control over incoming sensory impulses. This allows you, to ignore pain or noises in your environment, and focus your attention on what you choose.

Physical Health benefits

While the mental health benefits of regular meditation are well-known, there are also a wide variety of physical health benefits associated with the practice. You can experience improved immunity, improved cardiovascular health, decelerated aging, and relief from a long list of other physical and physiological ailments.

Self-Improvement Benefits

Self-Improvement is at the heart of Sahaja meditation. In fact, many practitioners use it for this purpose more than its health benefits. 

Improved Self-Esteem

You can improve your self-esteem through meditation. The practice of Sahaja meditation naturally reduces feelings of regret about past negative events, near-misses, or failures that can fuel unhealthy self-esteem.

The state of Thoughtless Awareness facilities several key emotional processes, like ego monitoring and regulation, increased motivation, emotional maturity and self-confidence, and overall mood improvement. This has a positive impact on self-esteem.

Increased Emotional Intelligence

Sahaja meditation fosters a rich emotional life, as it naturally helps you develop a blend of psychological abilities that are referred to as emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a key asset that is characterized by several personality traits including, self-awareness, motivation, and perseverance. It has been identified as an important attribute among leaders, and developing a strong emotional intelligence can help you achieve your professional ambitions.

Sahaja meditation also offers significant benefits to help manage anger, eliminate negative thinking, disarm defense mechanisms, increase empathy and compassion, cope with loss and grief and increase perception and creativity.

Holistic Healing

The power to heal lies within the body and meditation is a key to unlock its natural healing potential. Healing and long-term wellness begin with harnessing your own untapped energy, which makes Sahaja meditation the perfect way to start.

Through meditation, you’ll improve your mental and physical resilience. You’ll foster physiological stability and facilitate healing by reducing your stress, boosting your immune system, and improving your overall health.

Healing and self-improvement come from the inside out, rather than the outside in, and with persistent, long-term effort, meditation can be a successful approach.

Through its state of Thoughtless Awareness, many practitioners find that Sahaja provides deeper healing and self-improvement benefits than other forms of meditation.

Higher Purpose and Spirituality

Unique to Sahaja meditation, is our deep, committed interest in living with higher purpose and spirituality.

If you’re looking for spiritual enlightenment, or you’re on the path of self-discovery to identify your life’s true purpose, then Sahaja meditation is for you.

That’s because we reach beyond basic knowledge, and help you actualize your spirituality with specific techniques. Through self-realization, you’ll awaken and nurture the spiritual instrument within you, to unlock your life’s potential.

You will be united with what you were born for and meant to achieve.

On the spiritual plane, Sahaja is precisely what the mystics and monks from thousands of years ago were pining for, but did not have access to actualize in their lifetimes.

They fasted for weeks, lived in caves, hung themselves upside down from trees, and froze themselves to death in the frosty mountains of the Himalayas – all for this singular objective of actualizing their self-realization. Most of them still never made it.

Getting your innate spiritual being connected to the collective unconscious, and discovering your true purpose is only possible today in this new age of spirituality that Sahaja has ushered us into.

We experience profound joy when our practitioners reach their full potential.

Actualizing your spirituality also has positive impacts on your character and personality, and helps you make lasting transformations. The inner subtle instrument is so powerful that it can bring about your re-birth, which is formally known as Nirvana and Moksha. It can also recalibrate your Karma, and free you from it. Sahaja is the real deal – the actual method by which you work on these aspects in your life.

We can satisfy the thirst of the deepest spiritual seeker – ask and you shall receive!

Career and Professional Benefits

The practice of Sahaja meditation has many benefits that can contribute to career growth and professional advancement. These benefits include increased emotional intelligence and emotional maturity, social consciousness, empathy and compassion for co-workers and reduced occupational stress.

Summing up

Sahaja is a practice that spans 5-decades, and has a long list of practitioner-tested and approved advantages, and scientifically proven benefits. The practice has many layers, depths and dimensions to it, but each of them has corresponding benefits waiting to be unlocked through your regular daily meditation routine.

When you’re getting started, you’ll need help and guidance, which is what we offer in our guided meditation sessions and coaching. You’ll also need patience and perseverance – this journey is both transformative and life-changing, but it requires commitment and resolve.

We’re different from the 5-minute and 10-minute meditation courses out there. And from those who focus on cognitive strategies and mental exercises. We’re here to help you heal every aspect of yourself through a powerful form of meditation that’s much more than what it seems to be. Experience an accelerated path for a lifetime of good health, well-being, self-improvement, and spirituality, with Sahaja meditation.