People decide to start a meditation practice for a variety of reasons, some want to reduce stress and others do it as part of a spiritual practice. Meditation can do wonders for you, especially your mental health. If you have never tried meditating before you may have no idea where to start. Here is a meditation for beginners guide to get you started.
Don’t Try Too Hard
Meditation is different for everyone and every meditation session is different from the last. There is no “right” way to do it. Don’t get frustrated by thinking you aren’t doing it right, especially in the beginning. Just relax and try and calm your mind. Yes, that is easier said than done but that is what meditation is about. If you’re having trouble then just focus on your breathing until you relax.
Try Different Methods
There are a variety of different meditation techniques but for a beginner, you can start with the following types. The first is simply breathing meditation, where you simply sit there and focus on your breath.
You can also start with walking meditation (you have probably done this already without even realizing it). This is simply going for a walk and noticing what’s around you. Head to a local park or nature trail and simply walk around noticing the trees, plants, and flowers along the way. Lastly, you can opt for a guided meditation either by using an app or even finding one on YouTube. For this, you sit back and follow someone’s voice as they guide you through a relaxation technique.
Create a Regular Time to Meditate
It takes time to create a regular habit so give meditation a regular slot in your schedule. You don’t need to set aside hours only 10 to 15 minutes a day is fine. Even the busiest person can set aside a few minutes for regular meditation. Many people prefer to meditate first thing in the morning it allows them to start the day off right. Put your phone down, leave the email until later and reduce some of the negativity in your life.
Meditation is an amazing practice, it can help with both your physical and mental health. It only takes a few minutes a day, you don’t need to be an expert or need any special equipment to improve the quality of your life. Give regular meditation a try for just two weeks to understand just how beneficial it can be.
How do you feel when you wake up in the morning? Do you have a lot of energy and positive emotions, or are you feeling sluggish and unenthusiastic? What if there was a way to improve your mood before even getting out of bed in the morning? Meditation is an ancient practice that can help individuals achieve better physical and mental health. We’ll outline reasons why meditation might be something worth learning about.
Improve Your Health
Meditation has been shown to have some important health benefits. It can help individuals lower their risk of heart disease, improve bone density, reduce chronic pain, and more. Meditation also helps with stress relief, which is vital for maintaining good mental health.
Improve Productivity
Meditation can help you become more productive by improving your concentration and allowing you to better focus on the task at hand. Meditation will help you feel less overwhelmed by life’s challenges and give you a new perspective that allows for more efficient problem-solving.
Better Connections with Friends and Family
We all want to have better relationships with our friends and family, but it’s easier said than done. Meditating regularly will help you become more in tune with others’ needs and concerns so that you can be a better friend or partner. Meditation has been shown to increase empathy and lower aggression towards others.
Improved Memory
Along with concentration meditation has also been shown to improve memory and help you learn new information. This is due in part to meditation’s role in increasing grey matter within the brain, which boosts both long-term and working memory. Here is a closer look at how meditation can help with memory.
Increased Happiness
Reducing the amount of stress and anxiety you have throughout the day is the key to living a happier life. It’s hard to be happy when your mind and body are constantly tense from all of the stressors within your environment. Meditation helps calm those nerves by reducing activity in your amygdala, which regulates fear and stress responses.
Slowdown the Aging Process
Nothing ages us quite like stress. Researchers at Harvard Medical School found that meditation can help keep your telomeres long, which is helpful in staving off the visible signs of aging. Telomeres are protective caps on either end of DNA strands; they shorten with age and eventually become critically short, signaling the cell’s death.
Are you convinced yet? You don’t have to be an expert to reap the benefits of meditation. Give it a try it can truly improve your life!
We all know that meditation is a great way to reduce stress and improve our overall well-being. There are many ways to meditate, but one of the best ways is by using apps on your phone. This blog post will provide you with 5 different apps that can help you learn how to meditate or use meditation techniques at any time.
This app is great for meditating with your eyes open. It has three different modes that you can choose from, each lasting between 20-30 minutes. You are able to set a meditation timer and the option of background sounds to help enhance your experience.
If you’re looking for something more virtual reality related then this is the perfect app for you. With this app, you can explore a variety of virtual environments and listen to the meditation sessions that have been designed specifically for each environment.
This is another great app with plenty of different guided meditations in various lengths (ranging from two minutes to 60+ minutes) and categories such as sleep, mindfulness, and anxiety. It is perfect for people who struggle to find the time to meditate as you can integrate meditation into your everyday life.
This app is perfect for users who are looking for a quick five-minute session or want something more in-depth with longer sessions available too. It provides plenty of different categories, including sleep and anxiety relief which will help improve the quality of your mind and body quickly. It is perfect for busy people who want five minutes of meditation during the workday.
This app is perfect for beginners who are new to meditation and want something simple. It has one of the largest selections of guided meditations with plenty of different categories, including sleep and anxiety relief which will help improve your mind quickly. This makes it ideal for people who struggle to find time throughout their day or need some guidance when they can’t focus. ZenFriend also has daily meditation challenges to help you reach your goals. It’s free, but it does contain some ads if you don’t want to upgrade for $0.99 per month or $11.95 per year.
These apps are perfect for someone that is first starting out on their meditation journey and have trouble getting calm and focusing their mind. Meditation isn’t hard but it helps to have some guidance when you are starting out, if you can’t meet with a guide then apps are the next best thing.
Meditation is a hot topic these days. It’s being talked about in the media, and meditation apps are even reaching number one on Apple’s app store. However, meditation can be a tricky thing to do for many people. In this blog post we’re going to go over some of the most common myths that meditation has faced so far.
Myth #1: It’s Hard to Learn Meditation
This myth has been around meditation for years, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Although meditation can become more complex when you’re trying to meditate in certain ways or with different meditation tools, it’s still fairly simple – even if you don’t have much experience! The first step in learning to meditate is to learn how to clear your mind.
This is actually more difficult than it sounds for many people, but meditation apps like Buddhify can help you learn how to catch yourself when you’re thinking of other things and get back on track with meditation – without becoming too frustrated. These meditation aids make learning meditation easier and they give beginners exactly what they need in order to start.
Myth #2: It is a Religious or Spiritual Practice
This is a common myth about meditation, but it’s just that – a myth! While meditation can be incorporated into spiritual or religious practices and beliefs, you don’t have to subscribe to any particular religion in order for meditation to work.
In fact, many people who practice meditation do so because they want more peace of mind without subscribing to one specific faith or another. There are plenty of meditation techniques that are completely secular, which makes meditation an excellent practice for anyone who wants to learn how to better manage their thoughts and feelings without subscribing to a certain set of beliefs.
Myth #3: You Need Lots of Time and Space
Another common myth about meditation is that you need lots of time in order to meditate – like hours at a time! However, this isn’t true either. While it’s possible (and recommended) to take your meditation practice slowly while working up the number of minutes you spend doing daily meditation every day; even five or ten minutes can make a big difference when developing mindfulness skills and learning how best to cope with stress or anxiety.
Meditation can be of benefit to anyone of any level of experience, so don’t be scared off by the meditation myths you might have heard. Download an app or watch a video on basic meditation techniques and you’ll be meditating in no time.
The Life-Changing Power of Letting Go [Today, in Day 5 of the 10-Day Meditation Challenge, we explore the practice and principle of letting go with a reading, a short talk, and a guided meditation.] I spent 14 years, from the age of 25 to 39, living in a spiritual ashram. That’s the Hindu equivalent of […]
I don’t like it when the clocks change. It doesn’t feel natural to me. I do love thinking about that liminal line that spans the turning earth at all times, rolling everything up in the tide of darkness on one end and spilling it back into light on the other. The progression of that line […]
I know. The idea of self-love doesn’t sit so well with our Western sensibilities. But it hits on a topic that I’m eager to explore with you. Recently, I had an experience around self-compassion and self-love that was kind of a revelation for me. As a Mindfulness Meditation teacher, a lot of what I teach […]
One of the first things we learn on the path of meditation is that desire is an obstacle to our progress. And its inverse, avoidance (aversion), is an equal barrier to our evolution. But today, I want to talk about desire in a different way. Because, we can actually harness desire to deepen and ripen our mindfulness meditation. That’s right, desire can help […]
In mindfulness circles, there’s a popular story about an encounter with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It goes something like this. HH the Dalai Lama is taking questions at a conference and a Western meditation teacher asks him about how to help people who suffer from self-hatred. There ensues a protracted and vigorous exchange between […]
Imagine this for a moment. You wake up and the first thing that comes to mind is not your to-do list for the day. Instead, you find yourself eagerly anticipating your morning ritual. After getting your tea or coffee you sit down on your meditation cushion with a selected reading. Occasionally your mind drifts, but […]
Guided Meditation Audio Guided Meditation Video [I’m offering these free guided meditation in the lead up to the Coming Home Mindfulness Meditation Training Course starting Oct, 9th. More about that soon!] In this free guided meditation, we spend the hour doing a blend of mindfulness practices to ground ourselves in the body and connect to […]
About 10 years ago, my whole world turned upside down. All the stable ground under my feet disappeared overnight. Like that magician deftly whipping a sheet out from under the china set. But this time, imagine instead that the table itself disappears. Freefall… The contemporary spiritual ashram and community where I worked, lived, and practiced […]
Video Audio In this guided meditation, we engage with different mindfulness practices to prepare for a session of basic mindfulness. We do this in order to ground our attention in the body. Specifically, in the heart center. As we engage with these embodiment practices, we slowly start to feel into our entire breathing body. This […]
A lot of us meditate in and from our heads. But you know what? When we meditate, our whole heart and body is actually involved. If we don’t recognize that and consciously engage with it, we’re missing out on a lot of the wisdom and intelligence that’s naturally flowing through our experience each time we […]
