Meditation 101
Here are 10 reasons to meditate:
Understanding Your Pain : Meditation helps you become more aware of your physical and emotional pain, allowing you to address it with greater clarity and compassion.
Lower Your Stress : Regular meditation practice can significantly reduce stress levels, helping you feel calmer and more relaxed in daily life.
Connect Better : By enhancing mindfulness and empathy, meditation improves your relationships and communication with others, fostering deeper connections.
Improve Focus : Meditation trains your mind to concentrate better, enhancing your ability to stay focused and productive.
Reduce Brain Chatter : Quiet the constant noise and mental clutter with meditation, leading to a clearer, more peaceful mind.
Enhance Emotional Health: Meditation can help improve your mood and outlook on life by fostering a more positive and balanced mindset.
Increase Self-Awareness: Through meditation, you gain deeper insight into your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, which can lead to greater self-understanding and personal growth.
Promote Better Sleep: Meditation can relax the mind and body, making it easier to fall asleep and improve the quality of your sleep.
Boost Immunity: Regular meditation practice can strengthen your immune system, helping your body resist illness and recover more quickly.
Support Mental Resilience: Meditation helps build mental resilience, allowing you to better cope with challenges and setbacks in life.
Meditation is something everyone can do, here’s how.
Meditation is simpler (and harder) than most people think. Read these steps, make sure you’re somewhere where you can relax into this process, set a timer, and give it a shot:
1) Take a seat
Find place to sit that feels calm and quiet to you.
2) Set a time limit
If you’re just beginning, it can help to choose a short time, such as five or 10 minutes.
3) Notice your body
You can sit in a chair with your feet on the floor, you can sit loosely cross-legged, you can kneel—all are fine. Just make sure you are stable and in a position you can stay in for a while.
4) Feel your breath
Follow the sensation of your breath as it goes in and as it goes out.
5) Notice when your mind has wandered
Inevitably, your attention will leave the breath and wander to other places. When you get around to noticing that your mind has wandered—in a few seconds, a minute, five minutes—simply return your attention to the breath.
6) Be kind to your wandering mind
Don’t judge yourself or obsess over the thoughts’ content you find yourself lost in. Just come back.
7) Close with kindness
When you’re ready, gently lift your gaze (if your eyes are closed, open them). Take a moment and notice any sounds in the environment. Notice how your body feels right now. Notice your thoughts and emotions.
That’s it! That’s the practice. You focus your attention, your mind wanders, you bring it back, and you try to do it as kindly as possible (as many times as you need to).
https://www.mindful.org/how-to-meditate/
