8) Do you have any tips on integrating pets into meditation practice? 7) What if I get sexually (and physically) aroused by thoughts in my head? 6) What’s the best time of day to meditate? Whatever works. Consider your circumstances: children, pets, work. Experiment. But watch out. If you always choose the most convenient time, it will usually be tomorrow. 5) Is it better to practice in a group or by myself? 4) Is it possible I’m someone who just CANNOT meditate? 3) Should my eyes be open or closed? 2) Should I breathe fast or slow or in between? 1) If I have an itch, can I scratch it? When you’re learning how to meditate, it’s natural for questions to pop up often. These answers may ease your mind. Frequently Asked Questions About Mindfulness Meditation, AnsweredWhat to know and where to go when you’ve started.Beyond the Beginning
This loving-kindness practice involves silently repeating phrases that offer good qualities to oneself and to others. A Loving-Kindness Meditation
Explore this practice to extend compassion to yourself, those around you, and the larger world. You cannot will yourself into particular feelings toward yourself or anyone else. Rather, you can practice reminding yourself that you deserve happiness and ease and that the same goes for your child, your family, your friends, your neighbors, and everyone else in the world. Introduction to Loving-Kindness Meditation
As you begin, walk at a natural pace. Place your hands wherever comfortable: on your belly, behind your back, or at your sides. Walking Meditation
A mindful movement practice for bringing awareness to what we feel with each step. Fact: Most of us live pretty sedentary lives, leaving us to build extra-curricular physical activity into our days to counteract all that. Point is: Mindfulness doesn’t have to feel like another thing on your to-do list. It can be injected into some of the activities you’re already doing. Here’s how to integrate a mindful walking practice into your day. Introduction to the Walking MeditationIf you fall asleep during this body-scan practice, that’s okay. When you realize you’ve been nodding off, take a deep breath to help you reawaken and perhaps reposition your body (which will also help wake it up). When you’re ready, return your attention to the part of the body you last remember focusing on. The moment you notice that your mind has wandered, return your attention to the part of the body you last remember. Begin to focus your attention on different parts of your body. You can spotlight one particular area or go through a sequence like this: toes, feet (sole, heel, top of foot), through the legs, pelvis, abdomen, lower back, upper back, chest shoulders, arms down to the fingers, shoulders, neck, different parts of the face, and head. For each part of the body, linger for a few moments and notice the different sensations as you focus. Body Scan Meditation
A brief body awareness practice for tuning in to sensations, head-to-toe. Try this: feel your feet on the ground right now. In your shoes or without, it doesn’t matter. Then track or scan over your whole body, bit by bit—slowly—all the way up to the crown of your head. The point of this practice is to check in with your whole body: Fingertips to shoulders, butt to big toe. Only rules are: No judging, no wondering, no worrying (all activities your mind may want to do); just check in with the physical feeling of being in your body. Aches and pains are fine. You don’t have to do anything about anything here. You’re just noticing. Introduction to the Body Scan MeditationOnce you have explored a basic seated meditation practice, you might want to consider other forms of meditation including walking and lying down. Whereas the previous meditations used the breath as a focal point for practice, these meditations below focus on different parts of the body. More Styles of Mindfulness Meditation15-Minute Meditation
A practice that explores sitting in formal meditation for longer periods of time. 10-Minute Meditation
A longer practice that explores meditation posture, breathing techniques, and working with thoughts and emotions as they surface during mindfulness practice. 1-Minute Meditation
A short practice for settling the mind, intended for doing in the middle of the day, wherever you are out in the world. How long would you like to meditate? Sometimes we only have time for a quick check-in, sometimes we can dip in a little longer. Meditating every day helps build awareness, fosters resilience, and lower stress. Try to make meditation a habit by practicing with these short meditations from our founding editor Barry Boyce. Find time to site once a day for one month and see what you notice. Try this 3-part guided audio series from Mindful Editor-in-Chief Barry Boyce: Guided meditations are an excellent tool for beginners, as they provide a focal point and gentle instruction to help you connect and let go of self-judgment. 3 Guided Meditations for BeginnersWe “practice” mindfulness so we can learn how to recognize when our minds are doing their normal everyday acrobatics, and maybe take a pause from that for just a little while so we can choose what we’d like to focus on. In a nutshell, meditation helps us have a much healthier relationship with ourselves (and, by extension, with others). If you experienced these sorts of distractions (and we all do), you’ve made an important discovery: simply put, that’s the opposite of mindfulness. It’s when we live in our heads, on automatic pilot, letting our thoughts go here and there, exploring, say, the future or the past, and essentially, not being present in the moment. But that’s where most of us live most of the time—and pretty uncomfortably, if we’re being honest, right? But it doesn’t have to be that way. Welcome back. What happened? How long was it before your mind wandered away from your breath? Did notice how busy your mind was even without your consciously directing it to think about anything in particular? Did you notice yourself getting caught up in thoughts before you came back to reading this? We often have little narratives running in our minds that we didn’t choose to put there, like: “Why DOES my boss want to meet with me tomorrow?” “I should have gone to the gym yesterday.” “I’ve got to pay some bills” or (the classic) “I don’t have time to sit still, I’ve got stuff to do.”
The first thing to clarify: What we’re doing here is aiming for mindfulness, not some process that magically wipes your mind clear of the countless and endless thoughts that erupt and ping constantly in our brains. We’re just practicing bringing our attention to our breath, and then back to the breath when we notice our attention has wandered. A Basic Meditation for BeginnersThese are some meditation practices to get you going.Some Basic Meditations
Shifting the balance to give your intentional brain more power takes some work, though. Here are some ways to get started. But here’s the problem. While our intentional brain knows what is best for us, our autopilot brain causes us to shortcut our way through life. So how can we trigger ourselves to be mindful when we need it most? This is where the notion of “behavior design” comes in. It’s a way to put your intentional brain in the driver’s seat. There are two ways to do that—first, slowing down the autopilot brain by putting obstacles in its way, and second, removing obstacles in the path of the intentional brain, so it can gain control. Mindfulness is the exact opposite of these default processes. It’s executive control rather than autopilot, and enables intentional actions, willpower, and decisions. But that takes practice. The more we activate the intentional brain, the stronger it gets. Every time we do something deliberate and new, we stimulate neuroplasticity, activating our grey matter, which is full of newly sprouted neurons that have not yet been groomed for “autopilot” brain. It’s estimated that 95% of our behavior runs on autopilot. That’s because neural networks underlie all of our habits, reducing our millions of sensory inputs per second into manageable shortcuts so we can function in this crazy world. These default brain signals are so efficient that they often cause us to relapse into old behaviors before we remember what we meant to do instead. How to Make Mindfulness a HabitWe’ve gone over the basic breath meditation so far, but there are other mindfulness techniques that use different focal points than the breath to anchor our attention—external objects like a sound in the room, or something broader, such as noticing spontaneous things that come into your awareness during an aimless wandering practice. But all of these practices have one thing in common: We notice that our minds ARE running the show a lot of the time. It’s true. We think thoughts, typically, and then we act. But here are some helpful strategies to change that up: Meditation Tips and TechniquesMeditation is no more complicated than what we’ve described above. It is that simple … and that challenging. It’s also powerful and worth it. The key is to commit to sit every day, even if it’s for five minutes. Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg says: “One of my meditation teachers said that the most important moment in your meditation practice is the moment you sit down to do it. Because right then you’re saying to yourself that you believe in change, you believe in caring for yourself, and you’re making it real. You’re not just holding some value like mindfulness or compassion in the abstract, but really making it real.” How Much Should I Meditate?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). 7) Close with kindness 6) Be kind to your wandering mind 5) Notice when your mind has wandered 4) Feel your breath 3) Notice your body 2) Set a time limit 1) Take a seat 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: Meditation is something everyone can do, here’s how.How to Meditate
Here are five reasons to meditate:When we meditate, we inject far-reaching and long-lasting benefits into our lives. And bonus: you don’t need any extra gear or an expensive membership. While meditation isn’t a cure-all, it can certainly provide some much-needed space in your life. Sometimes, that’s all we need to make better choices for ourselves, our families, and our communities. And the most important tools you can bring with you to your meditation practice are a little patience, some kindness for yourself, and a comfortable place to sit. A selection of benefits that are associated with learning how to meditate.Why Learn How to Meditate?The idea behind mindfulness seems simple—the practice takes patience. Indeed, renowned meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg recounts that her first experience with meditation showed her how quickly the mind gets caught up in other tasks. “I thought, okay, what will it be, like, 800 breaths before my mind starts to wander? And to my absolute amazement, it was one breath, and I’d be gone,” says Salzberg. When we pay attention to our breath, we are learning how to return to, and remain in, the present moment—to anchor ourselves in the here and now on purpose, without judgement. How do you learn to meditate? In mindfulness meditation, we’re learning how to pay attention to the breath as it goes in and out, and notice when the mind wanders from this task. This practice of returning to the breath builds the muscles of attention and mindfulness. A brief explanation of the practice.What is Meditation?We welcome you to our Mindful guide to meditation, which includes a variety of styles of meditation, information about the benefits of each practice, and free guided audio practices that help you learn how to meditate and incorporate meditation into your daily life. Keep reading to learn more about the basics of this transformative practice that enables us to find more joy in daily living. |
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