When you think of people that meditate, you may be drawn into thinking of hippies and people like that but you would actually be wrong. All that meditation does is teach you to have more control over your mind. Thus, if you are depressed, meditation will help to lift you out of that feeling. If you are anxious, meditation will energize you. Thus, you can see that you can incorporate it into all areas of your life and use it for positive gain.
If you have never meditated before, let’s explain how it all happens. Although I do yoga meditation at yoga classes, I also got very interested in the Buddhist way of life. No, I will probably never travel to see Tibet or the Buddhist monks, but what I liked about their way of life was the gentleness of the philosophy and the fact that meditation is used in Buddhism to make you more aware of your spiritual side. Thus, it’s always going to help you to improve your character and your approach to life. You don’t have to sit in ridiculous positions, but you do need to respect some rules for common sense purposes. Being seated or standing up is your choice, but your back should always be straight. This is so that energy can flow through your entire body. You should also be in clothing that isn’t at all restrictive. Meditation was something that was doen by Siddhartha Gautama when he was looking for the answer to why so many people suffer in their lives. He found the answer and the Buddhist philosophy was his answer. Most of the things that made people suffer were created by their attitudes or their interaction with other people but he learned that meditation was a good way forward because it helped people to reach the spiritual side of their natures and that made them calmer and less prone to depression and unhappiness.
Your first attempt won’t give you amazing results so don’t expect it to. It takes a lot of practice to meditate effectively. Make sure that you won’t have loudness around you as you need peace and quiet. Close your eyes and breathe in through the nose the count of 7 - hold onto the breath for count 8- and then exhale to the count of nine. You exhale more air than you let into your body because this sets you oxygen levels correctly. You remember that exercise that anxious people do when they have a panic attack? They breathe into a paper bag and then rebreathe that air. The purpose of that is to get the oxygen levels correct. It’s the same with meditation.
After you have done one set of breathing in - holding the breath - and then breathing out from the upper diaphragm, count to one. Each complete cycle of breathing is a one count and you need to count to ten and then go back to one again. If you have any thoughts invade your mind while you are trying to meditate, then go back to one. The idea is that you think of nothing except your breathing. Thoughts will creep in at first but you need to banish them. There’s a very good reason for this. When you meditate you create a wonderful harmony between your mind and your body that puts you in control. It’s like getting close to your subconscious and allowing yourself to get to know the higher being within you. If all that sounds a little strange, then think of it as giving your mind a rest. Everyone needs this rest and when you are distressed, you don’t give yourself the rest that is needed. With meditation, you do.
I used to be skeptical about the purpose of meditation and used to question it because I was fighting having to shut down my mind. When you are anxious or suffering from depression, you tend to let thoughts drift around your head and also get things wildly out of proportion. I used to have these chains of thoughts that led to even more anxiety because I allowed them to. When I started to take up meditation, I suddenly realized that I was giving my head a rest and it was a rest that it needed. When you stop doing meditation, you don’t just get up and started life at the normal pace. You take yourself slowly back into it, so that your mind is capable of adjustment. What you do find, however, is that your subconscious is more capable of dealing with your emotional problems and that you make yourself more capable of dealing with the tasks that life asks of you. If you can’t get your head around sitting down meditation, try the same thing walking but instead of closing your eyes and risking tripping over something, lower your head. The walking process may help you.
If you do meditation for about quarter of an hour at first until you get the hang of it, you can increase this time to whatever you are comfortable with at a later time. I found that doing this in business was also very beneficial because it energized me. Instead of worrying about a meeting, I read the memo and then meditated. I didn’t practice what I was going to say or worry about different elements of the meeting. I simply meditated and when the meeting arrived, my subconscious mind had all the meeting arrived, my subconscious mind had all the answers I needed in order for that meeting to be successful. It took all the stress out of my life and helped me to be able to let go of things that would normally have me frantic with worry. In fact, I was so surprised when someone complimented me on my calmness because I never saw myself as calm and meditation gave me the calmness that my life lacked.
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