If you are a student here at SFCC that feels anxiety for that upcoming quiz, or depression from feeling out of control with your life, meditation may be a solution for you. We all have a fear of the future and troubles in our past, that can make tackling the everyday life of being a college students incredibly hard for us. This is why the Wellness Center here on campus recently provided a workshop about mental health and meditation. They brought in two experts to help teach students how to bring their mind and body to rest. Dr. Dexter Amend and Lama Lakshey Sangpo Rinpoche held an event to teach participants about the value of simple meditation and the health benefits it brings you.
“Meditation directly affects every aspect of our experience and is going to help everything,” Amend said.
As human beings, to perform at an optimal level and be the best we can, our body needs rest or sleep. This is what meditation does for us, it brings our body and mind to rest.  Amend said that a practiced mediator can get four hours of stage 4 sleep in just 20 minutes of meditating.
“This is how meditation affects everything, because it gives the body the rest it needs,” Amend said.
The two major mental health issues today, especially during this time of year, are depression and anxiety. When your mind starts running off into a state of constant worry or sadness about life, you can’t be the best you can be. Amend’s advice was very simple.
“Just don’t go there”, he said.
How do we accomplish this? A few minutes of meditation a day. Here’s how it works. Rinpoche said there are three stages of meditation to help keep your mind focused. The first is placement, focusing in on an object and nothing else; in this case, that “object” is your own breathing. Next is continued placement which involves mindfulness, or not forgetting your chosen focus, and alertness; keeping your mind from thinking about any outside noise or distraction. Finally replacement: by focusing only on your breathing, you are no longer letting your mind wander off into panic or past troubles or future worries, you are simply breathing and being in the present time.
“Everything happens in the present,” Rinpoche said. ”Meditation brings peace and joy to this moment and that brings a freedom.”
Amend and Rinpoche said that It’s very powerful to do this for even just two minutes, to bring you that freedom. Meditation is about getting to know your own mind, we for the most part are under the mercy of our own mind. With meditation, you are freed from your own mind and brought the joy of simply breathing in the present time. In some cultures, meditation is taught in the education system to bring peace and freedom from the mind to students to help them perform at optimal levels.
“Rest provides energy for optimal activity,” Amend said.
Meditation can’t be done with distraction, therefore your focus of your breathing must be complete. If your mind begins to wander off you must bring it back in.
“We live in a world where people are so confused and full of anxiety and depression. This is not normal for humans, this is a tragedy,” Amend said. Rinpoche agreed stating that
“Everything happens in the present but our mind distracts us with the past and future, with distraction comes errors,”.
Meditation helps you better handle being human. The best advice from this seminar was Amend’s thought on the mind “the mind is an idiot, let it go.” He said when you can find a way to separate yourself from your minds traumas you will have freedom.