Physical Benefits: From early childhood onward, most of us get into bad habits in the way we use our bodies. These eventually include not only a bad diet, excessive drinking, smoking and lack of exercise, but also the way in which we hold ourselves, the way we move, and the way we breathe. Over the years tensions creep up on us almot unnoticed: our breathing becomes irregular and shallow, our posture slumps, we sit badly, we walk badly and stand badly, and we even use our voices badly.
Meditation allows us not only to look at what is going on in our minds, but also what is going on in our bodies. It (mindfulness) gives us the space to check up on ourselves, to become re-acquainted to how it feels to live within our bodies, to become conscious of the way we breathe, and of the many minor aches and pains to which we subject ourselves by our usual way of being, so that we can at first consciously, but then with practice unconsciously, counteract them.
Mind benefits: The result is not only reduced stress for ourselves and often for others, but clearer vision and more objective judgment. Hurry is seen as counterproductive, and with patience there comes a greater ability to discriminate between what is important and what is not.
(David Fontana, Ph.D., Learn to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Self-Discovery and Fulfillment)
Mysticism and Psychology: The heart eager and restless, goes out into the unknown, and brings home, literally and actually, 'fresh food for thought.' Hence those who 'feel to think' are likely to possess a richer, more real, if less orderly, experience than those who 'think to feel.'
(Note: surely, 'NFs' on Jung's MBTI peronality typology inventory; probably an 'INFJ' to be exact.)
...it is essential that his love and his determination, even more than his thought, should be set upon Transcendent Reality. He must feel a strong emotional attraction toward the supersensual Object of his quest... Now, in dealing with this, and other rare mental conditions, we are of course trying to describe from without that which can only adequately be described from within; which is as much as to say that only mystics can really write about mysticism. Fortunately, many mystics have so written; and we, from their experiences and from the explorations of psychology upon another plane, are able to make certain elementary deductions. It appears generally from these that the act of contemplation is for the mystic a psychic gateway...
It remains a paradox of the mystics that the passivity at which they appear to aim is really a state of the most intense activity: more, that where it is wholly absent no great creative action can take place. In it, the superficial self compels itself to be still, in order that it may liberate another more deep-seated power which is, in the ecstasy of the contemplative genius, raised to the highest pitch of efficiency.
...the personality of man is a far deeper and more mysterious thing than the sum of his conscious feeling, thought, and will: that this superficial self - this Ego of which each of us is aware - hardly counts in comparison with the deeps of being which it hides. 'There is a root or depth in thee,' says Law, 'from whence all these faculties come forth as lines from a centre, or as branches from a body of a tree. This depth is called the centre, the fund, or bottom, of the soul. This depth is the unity, the Eternity, I had almost said the infinity of thy soul, for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it, or give it any rest, but the infinity of God (Wm. Law, 'The Spirit of Prayer').'
(Evelyn Underhill's unsurpassed classic work in its field: Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness)