When we meditate we step back from our everyday thoughts and simply observe our mind. We connect with a place of stillness within and become the silent witness or observer. This simple act of detaching from the constant stream of thoughts gives us the power to choose what thoughts we give our attention to. We may recognise that some thoughts do not serve us or are simply other people's opinions or old conditioned beliefs that no longer serve us. Meditation gives us the capacity to choose what thoughts to pay attention to and what thoughts to simply ignore. These negative thoughts loose their power over us and simply fade out of our mind. We vitalise the positive thoughts with our conscious attention.
This is why meditation is so effective in reducing stress, anxiety and depression as we experience these as a repetition of negative and self depreciating cycles of thoughts that come from old patterns of beliefs that no longer serve us. We can heal and change these old patterns and rewire new ones.
The regular practice of meditation gives us back the control and power of our own mind. We, our conscious self take the driving seat and this empowers us.
There is an Ancient wisdom axiom that science is starting to understand that says "Energy follows Thought" and so changing our mind changes the energy you give out into life and therefore the energy you attract into your life and this changes your life in a beautiful way. Other people will notice a positive change in you even before you do.
We can delve into the esoteric understanding of meditation and come to realise when we meditate we use our will to connect our conscious mind with the universal consciousness, our higher mind with our higher self, our personality vehicle with our soul and the intuitive messages that come to us come directly from our buddhic nature, the vehicle of our soul.
We feel nourished mentally, emotionally, energetically and physically by the soul as we make this connection. We build the antakarana, the rainbow bridge between our soul and our personality that enables the intuitive wisdom to flow more freely.
With regular practice we build a bigger and wider and clearer bridge until we come to a place where we live our life intuitively with messages from our soul creating a flow in life akin to the flow we see in a world class athlete who performs in a graceful seemingly effortless way to achieve greatness naturally.
This is the flow of the tao spoken of in ancient Chinese Taoist culture, it is the flow of the prana of Indian hindu belief or the flow of chi in Chinese medicine. It is the natural life force flow that we see in the symphony and beauty of nature and it is ours if we learn to reconnect with our body and come out of our thinking mind to a place of stillness.