Meditation is an integral part of yoga practice, in fact, the purpose of asana practice is to settle your body and focus the mind in preparation for meditation. However, you do not have to be an accomplished yogi or Buddhist Master to practice self meditation effectively, you don’t need to pretzel yourself into lotus pose – truly, for many of us, Lotus Pose is simply too physically challenging to allow focus. You can meditate while walking, while seated in a straight-backed chair, in Easy Pose, Simple Cross-Legged Pose and for the very flexible the classical meditation pose, Padmasana/Lotus Pose. Any pose that enables comfortable stillness for the body is effective for meditation; when you remove as many physical and environmental distractions as possible, the mind and breath are free to focus.

Meditation has many advantage on many levels, including:

Physiological/Physical

~ revitalizes the nervous system
~ strengthens neural pathways within your brain
~ increases lung capacity
~ increases oxygen flow to the brain
~ increase alertness
~ improves sleep
~ can minimize the effects of asthma
~ improves immune system
~ help in addiction/abuse recovery
~ reduces blood presure

Mental/Emotional

~ calms the senses
~ focusses the mind to bring clarity & perspective
~ soothes the over-stimulated Self
~ reduce stress
~ promotes positive outlook, reduces negative thoughts
~ increases Self-Esteem
~ improves memories
~ minimizes anxiety and hypersensitivity
~ increases creativity

Spiritual

~ allows the flow of prana/chi/life energy through the body
~ develops, promotes and maintains spiritual awareness
~ unites one with Consciousness and the truest Higher Self
~ increases connection with the Divine
~ balances the Doshas – especially Vata disturbances (see Ayurveda for information on the Doshas)
~ prepares the youself for the transition of Death
~ allows us to open our minds and hearts in order to Live more fully
~ brings us into the divinity of the present moment

Get to know the various types of meditation and benefits of meditation. Unlock the beautiful power of your calm mind today!

How long you like to meditate each day depends on you. A good beginning is 10 to 15 minutes per day. You might find that you naturally prolong your meditation time by adding five minutes here and there. Another way to expand the time you meditate is to set a goal of adding five minutes each week until you adopt a natural rhythm of twenty to thirty minutes. One of the pitfalls of beginning meditators must be too ambitious. Trust your intuition and start off with an amount of time that feels comfortable for you.

Advanced meditators normally spend an hour per day in meditation. If you can gradually work up to forty or sixty minutes the better your improvement will be. Consistency brings remarkable long-term benefits.

The key is to do them every day. The effects of self meditation are cumulative. Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin says, “Modern neuroscience is showing that our minds are as plastic as our bodies. Meditation can help you train your mind in the same way exercise can train your body.” Therefore, each and every minute you meditate you’re enhancing the biochemistry of your brain, building muscles that increase your mental, emotional and spiritual potential.

Sit, Breathe and Relax When you meditate, and take long slow deep breaths. Send the breath deep into your abdomen and then breathe out. Each time you breathe in imagine cleansing energy infusing your body. When you breathe out, ask your body to release your tension and stress.

Tips: To quiet a busy mind count each exhalation, beginning with one going up until ten, then begin the cycle all over again. If you forget where you are, go back to one and begin again. Do this for ten minutes to slow down mental activity. In the beginning many thoughts will come and go. When you notice you are thinking, bring your attention back to your breath. Linger on the peaceful space that lies in your thoughts. In time the space will expand.

Get to know the various types of meditation and benefits of meditation. Unlock the beautiful power of your calm mind today!

Learning how to meditate is one of the most important skills you can master and the sooner you learn to meditate the sooner you will gain more control over your life. Self meditation in essence is about finding your inner peace but there is more to meditation than just finding your inner peace. You can also use meditation to help you in every aspect of your life.

Deep-Breathing Meditation is one of the most effective meditation techniques which enables you to relax and prepare your mind for meditation. This is a varying meditation technique you can use to improve your life. Let us look into this meditation technique and how it can help you in your meditation voyage.

The Deep Breath Meditation is the first technique that all new meditators will be shown. This type of meditation technique involves learning how to breathe and to control your breath during meditation. This technique is sometimes called the Stillness meditation technique.

Learning to use the Deep-Breath Meditation technique will teach you how to control your heart rate, your breathing and also your ability to maintain control over your mind. All of us suffer from brain-chatter where we talk to ourselves. Apart from just controlling our breathing, we start off using this technique to get control of our mind and body. Once you have mastered this technique it allows you then to use other Meditation Techniques to improve yourself. Other meditation techniques you can use are the affirmative meditation technique as well as the walking meditation technique.

The other key advantage of mastering the deep-breathing meditation technique is that once you understand how to breath effectively using deep breaths to get control of your stress and emotions, you can use the techniques outside of meditation to quickly get control in a stressful situation. The more you practice the deep-breath meditation technique the better you will get at it.

When you start learning how to meditate, your body and mind must first be mentally prepared. Essentially it is now the time for you to start “thinking carefully about something…”.

This unfortunately is where most learners falter, and the primary reason for this is simply that the question always comes up. “WHAT DO I HAVE TO MEDITATE ABOUT?…”. “WHAT SHOULD I DO NOW”.

What most teachers will omit to teach, or tell you, is that objectively, to get the best benefits of meditation, you have to figure out first what you consider worth the effort, and then meditate on that.

That of course does not mean that you cannot go for the clearing of your mind meditation where you think about nothing. This you will find is rather on the difficult side however, and most seasoned meditators battle with this.

So, to begin meditating you would rather want to find a subject or topic to meditate on “think about”. These could include things like:

• Relaxing & destressing
• Just for fun
• Your health
• In preparation for a difficult task such as interview for a new job, first date…
• Some problem in your life
• Some problem at work
• Some spiritual pursuit
• Things like astral projection

This probably still has you a little baffled. “HOW DO I MEDITATE TO RELAX AND DESTRESS”. Well I can assure you that sitting there and whinning “I have to relax and destress” over and over again will not do the trick. Rather than focusing on trying to relax, think about the place that you feel safe and calm in and go there in your mind. Going there will also keep you going for a little while, making it possible for you to stay in this meditative state for a time. Now if you want to stay in this place a little longer, start focusing on details of this place in your mind.

Following this will likely make it possible for you to stay in meditation longer, and by the time you have awaken from your meditation, you will probably feel very relaxed. Get to know the various types of meditation and unlock the beautiful power of your calm mind today.

Every single person on this planet should learn how to meditate to help you in your day-to-day growth, to help you cope with the world and to help you deal with your anxiety.

The whole role of self meditation is to help find your inner peace that is the art of putting all that chaos in your mind and you life into some sort of order. The very first step of meditation is bringing you to a point of calm, a point of peace upon which you can build and manage control. Once you have achieved that stage, you can further explore your own mind. At the present time, our mind often swirls with information, facts, stress, worries and much more simply because of the way in which we live and the bombardment of information from commercial entities. The role of meditation is to help you to find a way of managing that information and to reflect on your surroundings.

Meditation will help you to find that point at which you can cope and manage all the bombardments without feeling over whelmed but that is not the only reason we meditate. Let me outline some simple reasons why you should consider learning the art of meditation.

One of the core reasons why an individual might learn meditation is to help with their ability to cope with stress and to become calm. One of the roles of meditation is to help release the alpha waves in both our left and right side of our brains. These alpha waves will help bring about a sense of calm, similar to when you would whistle a happy tune or a simply day dream.

Learning how to meditate and bring you to a state of calm will help you cope with the daily stress of life. From personal experience, I have found that if I do not meditate for 20 minutes a day minimum, I find that my ability to cope with the daily stress of work is far harder then when I have completed my meditation.

Get to know the various types of meditation and unlock the beautiful power of your calm mind today!