Do you often feel tired or stressed? If so, you’re not alone. In this busy world, juggling work, family, and other responsibilities can leave you feeling overwhelmed and anxious. Meditation might be the solution you’re looking for.
Meditation and yoga are powerful tools to help manage stress and bring peace into your life. Meditation involves using various techniques to clear the mind, calm emotions, and achieve a peaceful state. The best part? You can meditate anywhere, anytime.
Practising meditation has many benefits: it reduces stress, improves focus, increases emotional awareness, lowers anxiety, boosts mental health, fosters empathy and kindness, and helps you sleep better.
Let’s explore some simple meditation techniques that you can start from today onwards.
8 Meditation Techniques for Beginners
1. Breathing Meditation
Meditation and Breathing exercises can make your mind sharper. Breathing-focused meditation gives several cognitive benefits such as the ability to focus, fewer distractions, more positive emotions, and less emotional reactivity. In this technique, you have to focus on your breathing. When you focus on your breathing, you are focusing on the present moment. The more time you spend focusing on the positive things, the less you focus on the negative.
One of the breathing techniques is Dr. Andrew Weil’s 4-7-8 Breathing technique. This technique helps rejuvenate the nervous system. Here is how you can practice Breathing Meditation:
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Empty your lungs
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Breathe in through your nose for 4 seconds
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Hold it for 7 seconds
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Exhale through your mouth, making a whooshing sound to a count of eight
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Do this breathing cycle four times. Inhale (4 seconds), hold (7 seconds) & exhale (8 seconds)
2. Mindfulness Meditation
In Mindfulness meditation, you have to focus on the present and not get distracted by the thoughts of the future or stressing about the past. Mindfulness is a type of meditation where you focus on being intensely aware of what you are feeling moment by moment without judging or trying to interpret those feelings. While practising mindfulness meditations, you can take time to take a deep breath and scan your body from the toes to the top of the head.
3. Focus Meditation
In this type of meditation, you have to focus on an object or flower and examine it. You can choose an object and pay close attention to it. Every detail of that object should be the focus, and the focus should be so much that you don’t see anything else. This meditation helps you deepen your focus.
4. Walking Meditation
This technique comes from Zen Buddhism and is known as ‘Kinhin,’ a practice in which practitioners walk around the room holding their hands in shahsu: holding one hand closed in a fist behind the back, the other hand closed within the fist. You take a step after one full breath. The idea behind this meditation is to walk in silence while observing everything that is happening all around. For example, when meditating inside the room, you can look at things inside the room.
5. Progressive Muscle Relaxation Meditation
This meditation involves the tightening and loosening of muscles all over the body. You can start with the toes first and go towards the head or vice versa. By focusing on tensing and relaxing muscles individually, you become focused on the present moment. If your attention wanders, then you can refocus again on how your body feels as you work your way through the exercise. This type of meditation is very relaxing and soothing, especially before bedtime.
6. Mantra Meditation
In Sanskrit, mantra comes from two words: manas means mind, and tra means tool. Mantras are yogic devices based on sacred sounds to evoke specific psychological states. Chanting of the mantra leads to enhanced focused awareness. The most commonly practised mantras are “Om” and “Aham Prema.” To practice this meditation, you should sit quietly and chant the mantra 108 times and count it on a mala.
7. The Transcendental Meditation
This type of meditation is the fourth stage of awareness, the first three being the waking state, the dreaming state, and the state of a deep dreamless sleep. The trainer recites a specific mantra to an individual student, and it helps promote psychological integration. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is a spiritual guru who introduced this technique.
8. Guided Meditation
This meditation involves the usage of images and visuals, which can help in healing and personal development issues. You can practice this technique by sitting quietly and imagining yourself on the beach, listening to music, and doing anything else. Visualisation is all about using your imagination to think of different stories. You can always visualise a new life and focus on what you want. There are four simple visualisation techniques:
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Walking Along The Beach
When you are walking on the beach, use all your senses, like touch to feel the texture of the sand, listen to the waves, smell the salt in the air, and watch the beautiful sunset. The more you immerse yourself in the situation, the more relaxing it becomes.
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Wooded Trail
Imagine yourself in a forest or a wooded trail. You can imagine yourselves touching the bark of the tree, listening to the crunching of the leaves and basking in the aroma of the forest.
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Campfire Visualisation
This method helps remove stress and anxiety. You can imagine sitting in front of a campfire and looking at the warm flames.
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The Clean Room Visualisation
The clutter in your life can bring negative thoughts. Imagine a clean, restful space and how it makes you feel. Incorporate meditation into your daily routine to improve your well-being and manage stress. Start with these techniques and discover the peace and clarity that meditation can bring to your life.
What are the benefits of practicing meditation?
Below is a list that shows the benefits of practicing meditation:
- Meditation helps you build skills to manage your stress.
- It helps you become more self-aware.
- Reduces negative feelings.
- It helps you become more creative and patient.
- Meditation helps lower your heart rate and blood pressure.
- It helps you sleep better.
Summing Up
Stress, anxiety, and depression are rising as people neglect their mental health. Meditation can help manage stress, improve mental health, and enhance emotional well-being. This article introduces eight meditation techniques that can help you manage your stress.
Which meditation technique are you going to follow in your daily routine?
