Meditation for beginners: 11 tips
There are all kinds of ways to optimize your mental health and thereby improve your physical health as well. This includes hypnosis, mindfulness and, of course, meditation. If you also want to start meditating then this article was written just for you.
In this article, I will discuss why meditation is good for you and give you 11 practical tips that will allow you to start meditating right away.
What is meditation?
Meditation is actually a state in which you are aware of your thoughts and what is happening. It is also a way of being able to let go of those thoughts or at least not identify with them. This means that you can consciously choose not to act on your thoughts.
Meditation is actually a collective term for a variety of techniques that cause you to become aware of your thoughts and promote relaxation, love, compassion, forgiveness, inner strength, patience and other mental processes that reduce stress and make yourself mentally stronger.
So meditation can very well be sitting in a cross-legged chair focusing on your breathing, but you can also meditate while doing something and even repeat mantras to achieve a certain goal through meditation.
The benefits of meditating
Meditation has all kinds of benefits, both for your mental health and physical health. Evidence has been found that meditation helps mentally:
- Reduce Stress
- Improve mental processes (thinking becomes easier)
- Recognizing emotions
- Better self-awareness
- Improved memory
- Improved empathy (you can better empathize with another person)
Meditation also indirectly helps your body physically, such as:
- Lowering your heart rate
- Improving your bowel movements
- Preventing chromosomes from deteriorating
- Strengthening your immune system
- Lowering your blood pressure
- Reducing fibromyalgia symptoms
- Reducing psoriasis
- Reducing PMS
- Reducing infertility problems
- Improving breastfeeding
- Reduce symptoms of other conditions that respond to stress
Meditation tips for beginners
Of course, with all these benefits of meditation, you can't wait to get started. Therefore, here are some tips to help you make meditation a real habit so you can have the most self-aware and stress-free life possible.
Meditation is not something that happens automatically therefore you have to practice, practice and keep practicing. It's basically like exercise is for your body, but for your brain. Just as sports make your body stronger and more limber, meditation makes your brain stronger and more resilient.
1 Two-minute meditation
Start by sitting for two minutes. During those two minutes, you are simply silent. Things happen, like thoughts, and that's fine. The point is to be aware of what is happening inside you.
If you find it difficult to sit still by feel for two minutes, you can turn on a timer to make sure you've meditated long enough.
If you manage to meditate for two minutes you can add a minute. Some people who meditate a lot do so for up to half an hour at a time, but everyone started with a few minutes.
After two months, you can be on this way as early as 10 minutes of meditation a day!
2 Count your breaths
If you find it difficult to sit quietly for two minutes, you can count your breaths. Each time you exhale count this to 10 and then start over again. It is not your intention to breathe as much or as little as possible, and by counting to 10 and repeating this you avoid having a "battle" with yourself.
As you count, shift your attention to your breathing and feel your breath enter through your nose and fill your lungs.
3 Meditate first thing in the morning
Are you used to getting out of bed like crazy when the alarm clock rings and racing through your morning pattern to get somewhere on time? Do you also notice that everything can go wrong right in the morning, from dropping things out of your hands to forgetting to take items or losing them? As a result, you might spend up to two minutes cleaning up, searching or even going back home to retrieve what you forgot.
Bring calm and focus in the morning by first meditating for two minutes after waking up. You can do this simply in bed! Just be careful not to fall back asleep immediately ;).
Doing this every morning will also immediately get you in the habit of actually meditating every day. If you want to do it in the evening you forget it faster or sometimes you just don't feel like it. If you start the morning with meditating you can already cross it off your to-do list.
4 It doesn't have to be perfect
You might want to start meditating right away in a dressmaker's chair with your hands on your knees and palms up in a nice pair of harem pants with scented cheeses and your cat purring on your lap (if you have one), doing everything perfectly at once.
No need to.
In the beginning, just sitting down is enough. You can meditate on a chair, the couch and also the edge of your bed. Later you can worry about the perfect way to meditate, just start with it first.
5 Control your feelings
When you start meditating, it's not directly about improving yourself. It is also a good means of getting to know yourself better. First, check how you feel. Maybe you are skeptical, hopeful, happy, depressed or whatever. You don't have to change this immediately, just check how you feel first.
6 View your thoughts with an open mind
Of course, there are times when you are distracted from your meditation by thoughts and feelings that come to you. This is not a bad thing; these thoughts and feelings belong to you. Therefore, don't get angry at them either but look at your thoughts with a friendly attitude.
7 Stay with yourself
If you find that from one thought comes another and at one point you are completely in that train of thought, rather than in meditation, smile so that you prevent a negative emotion from taking over and then shift your attention back to your breathing. You can then also start counting again.
8 It's not about clearing your head
Many people think meditation is all about clearing your head. That may happen through meditation, but that is not THE objective. So don't worry if you don't automatically enter the state of mindlessness.
9 Don't worry about mistakes
As mentioned, it's not necessarily about thinking about nothing, but that is something that can happen during meditation. This immediately shows that you can't really get meditating wrong either.
Just start with it and find out for yourself what works for you and what doesn't. Doing something about meditation is already better for you than trying nothing at all.
10 Experience emotion for a change
If you spend a week practicing meditation, you can take the next step and that is to experience and learn about your emotions and thoughts better. If you get an emotion while meditating and thoughts, stay with that emotion and thoughts and in the process be curious about where it actually comes from.
We often want to avoid negative emotions and thoughts, but it is by looking at them more closely that you can get to know yourself better and find out why things go the way they do.
You'll know how to return to your breathing after a week, when you get tired of introspection you'll return and start counting again.
11 Focus on your other senses
After a week of practicing your breathing, you can also shift your attention to other things. For example, during meditation, instead of having your attention on your breathing, you can shift your attention to the sounds around you or the light or even the feel of your body.
You can alternate this daily. So on one day you focus on what you see right in front of you and how the light might be changed by clouds going in front of your window or the wind moving branches of a tree.
The other day focus on sounds, such as people walking past your home, sounds made by other occupants of your home, the wind whistling at a crack, and perhaps even traffic or birds around your home.
With these 11 tips, you should be able to get a good start on meditating daily and reducing stress.
Would you like to learn more about mental changes that can improve your life? Then come to a seminar or check out the courses offered by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands.
Sources:
http://zenhabits.net/meditation-guide/
http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/meditation-heals-body-and-mind