To awaken the consciousness of spirituality, to stimulate faith in oneself, to know oneself, to embark upon the voyage of self-discovery, to surrender oneself wholly to any suffering that one may encounter in the course of discovery, to develop the capacity for enduring pain and to change pain into pleasure - all this constitutes the process of meditation. Not only does this process affect the physical organism, change its chemistry, but also it enters the subtle world and affects our subtle bodies - the tejas sharira (´luminous body`) and the karma sharir (´spiritual body`).
Reaching there it destroys all defilements at the root. Karma sharira is the root of all distortions. The process of meditation attacks that root.