The del.icio.us way to learn about meditation

A search for bookmarks under the tag meditation on the social bookmarking website Delicious yields lots of results, 34770 to be exact. This shouldn't be too surprising, considering this is such a broad category. You can find articles on pretty much anything you wanted to know related to meditation, including how to meditate, how meditation works, and different kinds of practices that involve meditation. You can narrow your search by including other tags. You'll come up with 3747 bookmarked pages if you search for bookmarks under the tags meditation and health. By browsing titles, I found that the majority of these results are directly relevant to my blog.


When I searched meditation, I found an article from newscientist.com called Meditation Builds up the Brain, which was also tagged under health, brain, science and psychology. It explains how meditating increases the size of the cortex, which

results from wider blood vessels, more supporting structures such as glia and
astrocytes, and increased branching and connections.

It also improves performance, although how this happens isn't certain. Somehow, meditating boosts energy and immediately leads to better performance, especially when people are sleep deprived, even with people who are inexperienced at meditating. And it works better than taking a nap!

My search also brought me to The Benefits of Meditation, which is also tagged under health, mind, concentration, and stress. It explains various benefits, such reduced stress (obvious and repetitive, I know, but it's important!) and other less obvious effects, some of which go along with reduced stress levels. Meditators have a lower risk of heart disease, for instance. I liked this article because it doesn't overwhelm you with details. It says enough to get the point across while providing links for deeper reading on certain topics. For example, it simply states:

Meditation has also been shown to relieve the
pain associated with certain illnesses.

If you click relieve the pain, you are directed to a relevant article from Medical News Today. This would be really cool if only most of the links led to a page that wasn't expired.

Mind over matter, which is tagged under meditation, health, mind, book, and life, is about neuroscientist Shanida Nataraja's book, The Blissful Brain. She has some new and interesting ideas about meditation (although they are related to stress reduction). Her most intriguing comment was that meditation works because it integrates both sides of the brain:

Generally speaking, the left hemisphere is associated with analytical, rational
and logical processing, whereas the right hemisphere is associated with abstract
thought, non-verbal awareness, visual-spatial perception and the expression and
modulation of emotions. In the western world, most individuals navigate through
their everyday life in a fashion dominated by left-brained thinking.

Meditation teaches people to think less, feel more, and stop being overwhelmed by our ceaseless thoughts. Nataraja used skin response meters and electroencephalograms (fancy ways of measuring emotional changes and brain activity, respectively) on participants in her research and found that meditating activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which basically means more right-brain activity and less stress.

The final article that I will talk about, which was tagged under meditation, health and benefit is Drug Conditions that are Benefited by Meditation. Go to this site and you'll find a list of various health conditions (drug addiction, pain management, cancer, heart diseas, infertility, psoriasis, and fibromyalgia, to name a few) followed by a blurb with an explanation or evidence on how meditation brings about treatment or relief. For example, under infertility it says

Couples dealing with infertility may become depressed, anxious and angry. To
help them cope, Alice D. Domar, Ph.D., a psychologist at the Mind/Body Medical
Institute, taught the relaxation response to one group of infertile couples.
Compared with a similar group of infertile couples who did not learn deep
relaxation, the meditators experienced less distress-and were more likely to get
pregnant.

Delicious is a great resource if you want to learn more about the health effects of meditation, or pretty much anything else about meditation for that matter. The search results page gives information about each article's title, source, and tags. You can click on a tag to find more articles under that tag. There's also a list called "related tags." This is very helpful if you are trying to narrow your search and filter out the irrelevant junk. When I first typed in meditation, I was overwhelmed by all the results I got. But when I saw health under related tags, I used that to come up with a shorter list of articles that were specific to my area of interest.