Why Exercise Is Not A Substitution For Meditation

Exercise is, of course, essential for your health. And if you want to generate high performance results in your life, research shows you should take part in some form of exercise that you enjoy nearly every day.

But exercise is not a substitute for meditation.

Sure, you may feel similar after both exercising and meditating. Exercise helps close the stress response cycle, it stimulates feel-good hormones such as endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin, and it gives you space to lower your frenetic energy that comes from being in a 24/7/365 digitally connected world – so long as you aren’t checking email while lifting weights! You may even get great insights and creative ideas while exercising, like I do.

But there are several areas where exercise falls short when compared to meditation:

First, neuroscience research over the last couple decades from places like Harvard, Boston University, University of Bologna, and Massachusetts General Hospital have proven that a regular meditation practice positively changes the structures of the brain responsible for managing stress response, memory, sense of self, focus, anxiety relief, empathy, decision making, and youthfulness. (Long-term meditators had younger brains than those of non-meditators, according to a UCLA School of Medicine report!) If you aren’t meditating, you’re missing out on these high performance and life enhancing brain changes.

Second, so many of us equate our self-worth with how much we get done each day or how much we achieve. The stress from this achievement culture we live in is physically killing people since stress is a leading contributor to the majority of diseases. And it’s killing our connection to the things that are scientifically proven to make life worth living: our relationships, experiences that fill our heart and raise our happiness and fulfillment levels, and the beauty and healing effects of nature. All three of these things require us to STOP doing, doing, doing, achieving, achieving, achieving, consuming, consuming, consuming… and… just… be.

When we fall into the trap of only doing “meditation in motion” while exercising or practicing yoga, as I hear many of my clients discuss, we stay stuck in this same “doing” pattern. A major benefit of meditation is that by sitting in stillness we get to watch our mind and compassionately witness the thought patterns happening there. If we are exercising, we aren’t sitting still (as the practice was intended to be done when it was created thousands of years ago). Instead, while focusing on the workout (and distracting the mind), we lose touch with whatever might come up when we meditate in stillness.

Because what comes up in our meditation practice is golden nuggets for our growth. We must be still every day and witness what this is. What thoughts are bombarding our brain telling us to get up and start doing instead of just being? What feelings are we having trouble processing? How are we really talking to ourselves and does this internal dialogue serve our greatest, most empowered self?

Whatever comes up in our meditation practice that we may struggle with is the same thing that’s holding us back from what we desire in the rest of our life. By first identifying these patterns in meditation we can begin to explore with a trusted coach or mentor where these thoughts came from and how to replace them so we have control of our monkey mind, rather than being controlled by it.

Another benefit to meditation is that in stillness we can go within, connect to our center, and hear a deeper wisdom. Some call this God or Source energy. Some call this our inner strength or intuition or higher self. It doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is once you sit still regularly to learn about your thought patterns and work to lovingly release them, you will hear this greater guide within you. This inner guide helps us create clarity around what we want in life, it gives us answers to the questions we are struggling with, and it’s the source of our creativity and the artistic abilities that all of us possess in different ways.

Yes, by all means, please exercise – its critical to your health and well-being! But know that there is no substitution for the practice of meditation. So go get on your cushion.  Every. Single. Morning. 🧘‍♀️

With love, your coach,

Sara

xoxo