What is Meditation - How can you find peace

Meditation is an act of relaxing the mind. It trains the mind to become quiet and learn to clear its contents.

What is Meditation?

Meditation is simply a method to focus and concentrate on your own voice. If practiced consistently, then it can help you to have a say over your own unwanted emotions and feelings. Thus, helping you to filter out your own voice from the heap of different voices. Meditation calms your mind and suppresses your anger. Due to which you can excel in the decision-making skills because all you need for an effective decision is just a calm mind to think and act. Meditation has an immense number of uses and benefits, which can totally transform you and your destiny.

How to do meditation?

Alternative Breathing Technique
Sit in a comfortable position. Try to take a few deep breaths. Do this for a minute. Use your right thumb to close your right nostril and inhale steadily through your left nostril for 5 seconds. Take off your thumb and place your right-hand index finger on the left nostril and slowly exhale through your right nostril. Without taking off your index finger, hold for 2 seconds and start inhaling through your right nostril.

Now, take off your index finger from the left nostril, close your right nostril with your thumb, hold on for 2 seconds and slowly start exhaling from your left nostril. This is how every session should be initialized.

Later, the person may continue with this for about 10 minutes or may proceed towards chanting a prayer or focusing on the divine, depending on the choice of the individual.

Abdominal Breathing Technique
Also, abdominal breathing is a technique wherein, the person focuses his breathing on expanding his abdomen on inhaling and compress on exhaling. Here, the duration is similar to alternative breathing technique, where, 5 seconds of inhaling is followed by 2 seconds of holding and later 5 seconds of exhaling.

We know that meditation is very feasible to begin and implement in our daily lives. But some people find it extremely difficult to start meditating and therefore need help.

Life Positive offers support and helps to such people/seekers through their meditation sessions via it's trustworthy and certified meditation partners. Always feel free to contact a meditation coach near you.

Benefits of Meditation

Promotes restfulness and sleep

Meditation reduces the level of cortisol that is instrumental in stress buildup in the body. 'Happy Hormones' like dopamine and serotonin are secreted inside our body which enhances sleep quality. This helps in lighting up the mood.

Increases intuitive skills
It improves the capability of the five senses in a human body. These 5 senses are Vision, Hear, Smell, Taste, and Touch. When these 5 senses have an optimum capability, naturally, the awareness increases too. As we know, there is a one-to-one correspondence between awareness and intuition, it is quite possible for a person to predict and judge situations better than any other.

Enhances creativity
Meditation improves our perception. It helps us to connect with the world in an efficient manner. Hence, we can innovatively twist, turn, churn and modify things. This leads to new discoveries and inventions and resembles the creativity within us.

Ward off illnesses
Meditation strengthens our bond with the world and develops a better emotional connection with it. When there's loneliness, the mind has a tendency to go out of control with unwanted thoughts. Meditating helps in reducing the plethora of never-ending thoughts. Also, many of the doctors suggest their patients meditate whenever they are idle, free or when they do not have to catch up with work.

Reduces stress and anxiety, alleviate fears and phobias
Meditation helps in bringing down the neural oscillations from gamma to beta and then to alpha frequency. At alpha frequency, both the mind and body are in a relaxed state. Moreover, this relaxed state is crucial in bringing down stress and fears within us.

Heals minor diseases
Meditation helps in treating high blood pressure, an early stage of bronchitis, headache, and body weakness.

Myths about meditation

Meditation takes a lot of time and efforts
It doesn't need any effort from your side. All you need to do is, sit comfortably in a position which you prefer. Naturally, no one would be able to dedicate too much time to meditate. Hence, it's important to understand that even 5 minutes of meditation, 4-5 times a day, is fair enough for beginners. That would roughly culminate to 20-25 minutes a day. Therefore, even time is not a constraint.

It requires a calm mind
Interestingly, most people resort to meditation once stress starts taking a toll on their lives. Therefore, there is no logic in saying that a calm mind is a prerequisite. Yes, to achieve calmness is surely an object of it. No one has ever said to remove every thought before meditating. Gradually, you train your mind to become thought-free in the process itself.

It is dependent on religion
Meditation is the world where you and your mind reside. There's neither prejudice nor a question of belief. Moreover, all people irrespective of their religion can practice meditation.

Meditation is only for adults
In simple words, meditation is an absolutely safe technique and no harm can come out of it. Therefore, it can be practiced by children, adults and aged people equally.

Quiet surroundings like temple or garden are necessary
As the objective of meditation is to calm our minds, there's no doubt that a quiet place would prove beneficial. However, when you have a mind and body of your own, no environment can deter you from working the way you expect to. In the modern-day, because of the hustle-bustle in cities, it's conducive to find a quiet place, and that would be a garden or places of worship, etc. Therefore, all you need is a secluded corner, whether it be in your home or gym, to start meditating.

Meditation solves all our problems
Meditation won't put an end to our problems. In fact, it doesn't even help in escaping it temporarily. However, our body tends to overreact to situations, and hence by meditating we can settle and balance our body accordingly. We can adjust our focus in the right direction. The act of meditation doesn't solve anything, but it enables and empowers us to fix the problems ourselves.

           As rightly said by Virginia Satir,

           Problems are not the problem; coping is the problem.

Meditation, whether performed for a short or long duration, is quite beneficial for the mind, body, and soul. It helps us to connect with our own lost self.

If you are trying hard to meditate, but still facing troubles. Then at least, involve yourself in the recognized and certified best meditation course, which will act as a catalyst and will speed up your process.