clipped from: www.everydayhealth.com   
Meditation is a systematic method of regulating your attention, often through focusing on your breathing, a phrase, or an image. It may include calmly dismissing distracting thoughts and feelings while sitting in a relaxed position with your eyes closed.

Meditation is used to relieve stress and elicit the relaxation response, a state of profound rest and release. Some experts believe that by regularly practicing techniques that evoke the relaxation response, such as meditation, you can help your body erase the cumulative effects of stress, which has been linked to health problems such as high blood pressure, heart disease, a weakened immune system, and asthma. As noted earlier, there appears to be a link between stress and depression.

Studies have found that meditation can help prevent relapse in people who have had three or more episodes of depression. For example, in one study, while 78% of depressed people given normal treatment for depression relapsed in the following year, only