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Wellness Wisdom with Dr Suresh Vassen: Biohacking Your Inner Nature With Meditation

Biohacking Your Inner Nature With Meditation 

Meditation and prayer have been linked to many health benefits. Could these benefits be because meditation changes our genes in a positive way?

Studies suggest meditation might affect how our genes work. This change could explain why meditation, yoga, and breathing exercises might help our health.

For instance, one study showed that after meditating for eight weeks, people had changes in genes linked to the immune system, blood sugar, heart health, sleep, and more.

Scientists are still figuring out exactly how meditation works. But there’s evidence that calming the mind and body might trigger a powerful effect in our genes, helping us heal from the inside out.

Our genes come from our ancestors’ behaviours over thousands of years. For example, humans developed a gene to digest starch because we’ve been eating it for a long time.

So, if meditation changes over 2,000 genes, could this be because it’s similar to something early humans did a lot?

It’s unlikely meditation itself explains the genetic changes. Meditation hasn’t been practiced globally for thousands of years. Also, the benefits aren’t limited to people of Indian descent, where meditation has a long history.

For meditation to affect this many genes, there must have been a similar, widespread behaviour for a very long time.

Maybe the answer lies in our natural world. Perhaps the peace and quiet of our wild past triggers the same positive gene changes we see with meditation.

In that sense, meditation could be a way to biohack our bodies. It might be a way to mimic the genetic repair response we got from living close to nature for millions of years.