According to Headspace, meditation is about training in awareness and getting a healthy sense of perspective. You don’t try to turn off your thoughts or your feelings but you are learning to observe them without any judgment. With practice, meditation brings an awareness to achieve mental clarity and emotional calm.
Why Meditate?
Follow this link to discover many reason to start Meditation. Meditation has been scientifically proven to reduce stress and anxiety, improve health, and increase happiness. Finding a style that you are comfortable with and practicing every day, you may just find that you are better at it then you thought!
Remember, it is a subjective practice so there is no right or wrong way to meditate!
Here are nine popular types of meditation practice:
- Mindfulness
- Spiritual
- Focused
- Movement
- Mantra
- Transcendental
- Progressive relaxation
- Loving-kindness
- Visualisation
Not all the meditation styles are right for everyone. Each style will require different skills and mindsets. How do you know which meditation practice is right for you?
“It’s what feels comfortable and what you feel encouraged to practice,” says Mira Dessy, a meditation author and holistic nutritionist.
Tools For Meditation
Taking the time to switch off, truly relax isn’t as easy as it sounds. Learning to be a spectator in your own thoughts. But how do you get started?
Guided Meditation
If you struggle as I did, you may wish to use a Guided Meditation app, tool or smart assistant. Try asking your Alexa, Siri, Google or Cortana for a meditation.
A guided meditation is a meditation led by a teacher. This could be in person or via an audio or video track.
Listening to guided meditations doesn’t let your mind fully switch off and have it’s wander. But as a beginner, these Apps will get you started and help create the habit of meditating. You can explore other methods as the foundation is being built.
As well as the Apps on your phone and tablet, you can ask your Home Assistant (Alexa, Cortana, Google, etc) to connect to your favourite mediation app. Don’t forget, you can also find meditations, meditative tunes, albums and playlists on your favourite music/video platform. For example, YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music.
TIP: A bit obvious perhaps, but look for meditations that don’t run adverts. This is getting harder to do on YouTube as channels want to monetise. The paid version of Spotify only has ads on Podcasts but I’ve only heard them at the beginning or end of the broadcast – I assume that’s going to be across the board.
Enjoy A Class
Have a look around your local area for meditation classes. These types of classes are becoming more popular though you can still meditate in a Yoga class or even a Martial Arts class. If you can’t find something local, there are thousands, if not millions of classes, courses and events available online. Some offer free trials too. If you use Google, you can use the search “Yoga near me”
