Meditation serves diverse purposes, and virtually everybody has practiced one form of meditation — including you. There is more to meditation than breathing slowly and listening to calming music; it requires all five senses to be in sync. Seriously, to make the most of your meditation experience, you should learn to involve your five senses. And we will tell you how later on in this article.

Until then, please read on as we explore the benefits of meditation.

What Are the Benefits of Meditation?

1. Meditation helps to Reduce Stress

Interestingly quite a lot of medical research supports the claims and beliefs that meditation a great way of reducing Stress. How?

When you undergo any form of Stress, it negatively impacts your body, and your body reacts by releasing a stress hormone known as Cortisol.

High levels of Cortisol further enhance the production of inflammation-promotion chemicals called cytokines, and that’s why you experience fatigue, cloudy thinking and even sleep disruptions. Other effects of stress include anxiety and depression and increased blood pressure.

Practice mindfulness meditation — it helps!

2. Meditation Helps to Control Anxiety

If you are struggling with anxiety disorders like panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and phobias, practicing meditation help to lower anxiety levels. Meditation also helps with managing work pressure.

3. Meditation Promotes Emotional Health

Remember cytokines? The inflammation-promotion chemicals we mentioned earlier? It also affects your mood and can lead to depression.

Meditation can help reduce the production of these inflammatory chemicals, which causes stress and anxiety. Thus, reducing the chances of depression while also promoting positive thinking and optimism.

Other benefits of meditation are:

4. It enhances self-awareness
5. It helps to lengthen your attention span — which is good for maintaining focus and concentration.
6. Improve sleep.

Creating the Perfect Environment for Meditation

Having highlighted the benefits of meditation, the next thing you should understand is how your environment affects meditation.

Yes, you can meditate anywhere and at any time. However, it would be best if you had an enabling meditation environment to get the full benefits.

So, how do you create the perfect meditation environment?

Make Your Meditation Environment Comfortable.

Speaking about comfort, meditation requires all of your five senses to be in sync and rhythm with each other. Let’s share tips on how you can meditate using your five senses — 5 - Senses Meditation.

Sound

Some people like to have music while meditating, and others don’t because it interferes with their focus.  Some instruments, like the singing bowl, tuning fork, kalimba, among others, enhance meditation — you should experiment with them and see what works for you.

Sight

The nature of light and the environment where you meditate affects your level of concentration during meditation. It would be best to choose the right kind of light and the color as well. Blue and green are said to promote tranquility, while Yellow is said to promote happiness. You can also consider natural elements of nature such as earth, water, fire, and air.

Scent

During meditation, you need pleasant scents and aroma to help relax your mood and enhance concentration. There are quite many scents you can consider — take frankincense and myrrh as an example, they have been used since Biblical times for prayers. Or you can choose cedarwood, sandalwood (there is a reason why so many monks meditate under trees), rose, and other calming aromas. What your nose naturally inclines to will do just fine.

Touch

Have you ever wondered why people used prayer beads during meditation? Touching and feeling objects can help you connect with your environment.  Also, it would help if you were mindful of your surface you are sitting on and how it affects your posture — doing so helps prevent discomfort and ensures healthy spine alignment.

Taste

Some plants can help reduce stress and anxiety and helps you relax during meditation. Making tea out of them will help promote your concentration and relax your mood.

You can try chamomile tea, green tea, and decaf tea. Having a piece of raisin or chocolate in your mouth can also help — the idea is to savor the explosion of flavors and texture.

How to Stimulate Your 5 - Senses During Meditation?

If you are struggling to get the right aroma, light and music, and the right burst of aroma during your meditation sessions, you should try out Aromeo Sense.

Aromeo sense is a multi-sensory device that helps stimulate your sense of smell, hearing, and sight. It has a Relax module that is thoughtfully designed to help with (mindfulness) meditation.

Aromeo sense offers a perfect combination of breathing light animation, calming aromas, and themed music to fade all distractions. To create the ideal meditation environment, consider getting yourself Aromeo Sense, it's a decision your mind and body will thank you for.