Meditation has an amazing range of benefits for our health and wellbeing. Medical studies of people who meditate shows that they have lower blood pressure, better circulation, more energy, lower cholesterol, less anxiety, quicker reactions, and a host of other positive characteristics.

A study from the University of Massachusetts Medical School recorded the brainwaves of people who took a class in meditation before, during, and after their lessons. The subjects were employees of a high-tech company and had been identified as stressed before they began their eight week training.

The subjects, compared with a control group of fellow stressed out tech workers, showed changes in their brain waves that lasted not only throughout the training, but were still in play four months after the training had been completed.

Numerous studies of people who meditate as part of a spiritual discipline, such as Buddhist monks, have found significant and lasting benefits to regular meditation, ranging from improved physical health to greater orderliness of brain function and increased spiritual experience.

Studies from the 1960s on showed that the brainwaves of these skilled meditators were different from those of ordinary people. It was found that people who meditated deeply and regularly had an unusual amount of control over their bodies. They were able to slow their heart rates, to use less oxygen, to disregard pain, and to give themselves greater energy and ability at physical tasks.

A recent MIT study published in the prestigious Brain Research Bulletin reported that people who had never meditated were, when trained in meditation, able to gain this greater control in a surprisingly short amount of time. Newer, more sophisticated technology allowed these researchers to identify changes in the brain waves of the subjects in specific areas of the brain controlling specific parts of the body.

Harvard Medical School researchers found similar results among people who meditated for as little as ten minutes at a time.

In fact, the benefits of meditation are so well known that there is virtually no disagreement within the scientific community about the value of meditation. Nearly all spiritual traditions include meditation as a valuable spiritual practice. Medical professionals, too, are in favor of meditation for both physical and psychological wellbeing.

So why don’t we all meditate daily?

Our modern world is not conducive to natural meditation. We start our days with a to-do list on our minds. We spend our days surrounded by news, music, and noise. We’re plugged in to the needs, wants, and demands of other people through our computers and phones, as well as with the people we actually see in the course of the day.

When we try to meditate, our brains are full of chatter: things we should do, things we’ve learned, things we wonder about, things we worry about, things we might forget, things we just haven’t finished processing yet.

Even if we’re able to get away from the tweets and chirps of our electronic devices, most of us find it very hard to get away from our internal noise.

That’s where binaural beats come in.

Binaural beats naturally tune our brains to the frequencies that allow us to experience deep meditation in spite of the overactivity of our minds. We become more relaxed and more capable of the deep meditation we need.

Binaural beats make theta brainwaves, associated with dreaming and deep relaxation, available to us along with our alert beta brainwaves. When our brainwaves are tuned to the right frequency – something that happens quite naturally through the use of binaural beats recordings – we are able to reach a deep meditative state without effort.