Whether you extend your lifespan or not, meditation can extend the length of time that you are healthy and active.

Meditation is associated with many psychological and physical benefits.

1. Memory. "Meditation is associated with enhanced short- and long-term memory," says neuropsychologist Jean Lengenfelder, assistant director of traumatic brain injury research at the Kessler Foundation.
2. Cognitive decline.  A 2014 review of a dozen studies involving older adults, published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, suggested that meditation was linked to positive effects on attention, memory, executive function, processing speed and general cognition.
3. Digestion and circulation.When in stress mode, our body no longer focuses on everyday functioning, like digestion - everything becomes secondary to our body's "fight or flight" survival response.  Of key importance to the digestive system, especially the stomach and intestines, blood oxygen levels and circulation are multiplied during meditation.  
4. Stress. Meditation has been shown to decrease stress and have a calming effect on older adults," Lengenfelder notes. "That can help them organize their thinking and give them a clearer perspective. They have improved focus, and their mind is sharp."
5. Inflammation:  Meditation has been shown to improve inflammation as well
6. Blood Pressure:  Meditation has been shown to lower blood pressure
7. Chronic Pain:  Mediation has been shown to improve pain better than morphine.
8. Anxiety:  Experts say that those with anxiety have difficulty in coping with stress and are shown to have physiological effects including raising heart rate and blood pressure and increasing one's risk for heart attack and stroke. Meditation reduces anxiety and rumination that leads to anxious thoughts and feelings.
9. Loneliness: It has been shown that lonely older adults have increased expression of pro-inflammatory genes and both were reduced by meditation.
10. Aging related decline: Lazar in 2008 showed that cortical thinning (which plays a part in the executive functions of organization, self-monitoring and impulse control) due to aging was strengthened; increased gray matter in insula, hippocampus (which is responsible for memory and detecting threats) was found by Holzel in 2008
11. Immune System:  Davidson in 2003, and Tang in 2007 found proof of improved immune system. An extensive insurance study also showed that meditators’ doctor visits, hospital visits, and medical costs where much lower than non-meditators when matched for race, gender, and other similar traits in the control group.

Dr. Stephanie Cheng sees older patients regularly.  She has noticed that some of her patients who meditate are able to reduce medications (such as antihypertensives and antidepressants).  She also notes that she has seen their blood pressure, stress and depression decrease and on the upside, experience greater well-being, increased peace and quality of life. "One thing I see commonly is people noticing the blessings and abundance in their lives. It increases gratitude for what they have," she says.

"It can be transformative," Dr. Moria Smoski, a psychiatrist agrees. "I've seen meditation help people feel more grounded as they're going through difficult situations. It improves their sense of resiliency."

No one is too old to begin The Art of Ascension.  It’s simple and charming to the mind.  No postures are required, so no need to worry about forming into a pretzel to learn this practice.  

Google, Yahoo, Nike, Pearson, Prentice Hall Publishing, AOL Time Warner, Deutsche Bank, Proctor and Gamble as well as HBO offer official meditation spaces in their corporate offices.  At General Mills, there's a dedicated Meditation Room in every building of their vast campuses, and they offer all staff members weekly meditation sessions and yoga classes.  In San Francisco, Salesforce offers employees a Meditation Room on every floor with the CEO saying it was “really important to cultivating innovation.”  
Steve Jobs most likely put the meditation-room-at-work trend on the map. At Apple, Jobs introduced 30-minute daily meditation breaks at the company, then had Meditation Rooms built throughout their offices worldwide in the company’s infancy.  Jobs, who began meditating at 19, said about meditation - “Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it.”
 
While Meditation Rooms are available for employees who practice meditation, employees who don't pray or meditate can use the quiet room to get away from the stress of the office environment, recharge and refocus. Therefore, companies may call this type of space a Meditation Room or use the term "quiet room."
By providing a space for these practices, companies send a message that the well-being of its workers is important, enhancing its image as a good company to work for. This pays off for the company in the retention and recruitment of talent.
Innovative approaches for Meditation Rooms include:

• New Orleans city hall created Meditation Rooms designed for the youth of that city, in particular youth at risk.
• Increasingly, airports are offering Meditation Rooms, including San Francisco, Raleigh-Durham, Chicago O’Hare, San Diego, and Zurich.
• More and more High Schools and Colleges are offering Meditation Rooms for students.
• Inhere Studio designers created an attractive oval meditation pod that can drop into almost any environment to help workers relax and unwind.  It is made of wood slats with a fringe curtain opening so that you feel some privacy without feeling enclosed. The pod is 8 feet by 6.5 feet and includes a meditation chair.

 
Cleveland Clinic study showed that meditation at work reduces stress and boosts morale even showing a 28% increase in vitality (the measure of how energized a person is during the day).  Michael Roizen, M.D., the Chief Wellness Officer at Cleveland Clinic, said “Unmanaged stress is the largest cause of chronic disease in the world,” Roizen said. “Stress is associated with heart disease, stroke, cancer and dementia. These data show that while you cannot always eliminate the events that cause you to feel stress, you can always manage your response.”
A study conducted at the University of Washington found “that those who had meditation training were able to stay on task longer and were less distracted. Levy and his co-authors discovered that meditation also improved test subjects' memory while easing their stress.”
 
Nico Pronk, Ph.D., F.A.C.S.M., F.A.W.H.P., president of HealthPartners Institute and chief science officer for HealthPartners. "Precision, accuracy, speed, and quality of work all suffer when people are stressed."
 
Meditation Rooms benefit companies just as much as it benefits employees.  It can lower a company's health-care costs by reducing chronic stress, a major risk factor for illness, said Maryanna Klatt, lead author of a 2009 study at Ohio State University.
 "More productive employees create a more pleasant company culture and an increased bottom line," explains Steve Orma, Psy.D, a clinical psychologist and specialist in insomnia and anxiety. "This kind of culture attracts the most talented applicants, because they want to work in that kind of environment," he says. "Just look at all the perks companies like Google offer their employees and how that attracts the smartest people in the world."