What is meditation?
To put it simply meditation is a practice of the mind. You meditate to help your perception and awareness of both things inside and outside your body. There are many different ways to meditate, but basically to meditate you pay attention to your body, feelings, and thoughts. This can help you to find clarity as well as to relieve stress, improve focus, improve sleep, and many other things.
How to meditate
I am no expert when it comes to meditation. I will show you a simple way to meditate as well as provide a couple of resources that guide you through meditation better than I can. I’ll try to explain it as best as I can:
- First, sit down comfortably. Preferably somewhere quiet and peaceful.
- Next, take a few deep breaths and then close your eyes.
- Now pay attention to how your body feels and at the thoughts you are having
- Try to experience these things from a third person perspective. As if you are observing these things, but cannot change them.
- You can then pay attention to either your breathing, thoughts, or sensations in your body.
- You can count breaths or do a body scan to help you.
- Whenever you notice your attention going somewhere else try to calmly bring your attention back.
- Don’t get frustrated at intruding thoughts or feelings, just let them pass.
- To end you can think about what you are grateful for that day or you can think of a feeling or state of mind you want to carry throughout the rest of your day.
- Lastly, open your eyes and attune yourself back to your surroundings.
- You can meditate for as little as 30 seconds or as long as you want. I tend to aim for 5 to 10 minutes.
Congratulations you just learned to meditate and can try it for yourself!
I try to meditate in the morning as it seems to work best for me.
The challenge
For this month I want us to learn how to meditate and to do it for a minimum of 5 minutes per day to start.
Meditation has many benefits and I will attempt to capture a lot of them at a later date.
I have recently started meditating to help with sleep and I have noticed a big difference in my ability to fall asleep at night. And I only do it for 10 minutes a day.
For this sleep training meditation I have been using the Headspace app. I really enjoy it and think it is a great resource. Right now Headspace is even offering a full years of membership to anyone suffering from unemployment due to everything going on in the world right now. I pay $10 a year for the student membership. Here’s the link to try Headspace. You can either use the app or the website.
You can also find lot’s of free guided meditations on youtube. Here’s one I liked for an example.
Hopefully you will join me in learning to meditate. It is a very helpful skill to learn. It helps a lot to deal with the daily stresses we all go through.
Now get to meditating! But, first if you found this post helpful don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe, and share.
I will be posting more on this subject soon. Thanks for reading.