Meditation Monk

All over the world people are struggling with stress: work stress, family stress, life stress. And this is exacerbated for people suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Depression etc. It’s easy to say relax, unwind. Not so easy to do.

As I worked with clients, both through hypnosis and coaching, I realised that people needed something to take away with them. Something for when I wasn’t around.  Something they could do when they wanted to relax, unwind, de-stress. Something that wasn’t alcohol or pills.

I had started using colouring with a few younger clients, all male, who didn’t want to talk directly about how they felt. So I created mandalas and gave them coloured pencils. This turned out to be an excellent way to get them to open up while taking the focus off them.

From there, I started using colouring pages with other clients. Soon, grown adults could be seen marching out my door, clutching colouring sheets and pencils!

My clients are not traditional colourers, although to be fair, who is? The men in particular are not fans of paisley patterns or cute little animals.  As one said, it’s hard enough walking around in public carrying a colouring book or going into a shop and buying one without actually sitting down and colouring something like a kid.  So I made blocked patterns for them, designs taken from a section of a mandala and extrapolated.

Here is an image of a work in progress from one of my clients, taken from https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/cooldoodledesigns :

Sitting down with paper and colouring pencils or pens allows us to spend time on ourselves, relaxing, focusing only on the image in front of us. We can feel the stress slipping away as we switch off our phones, TV, landline, laptop, tablet, whatever electronic device we would otherwise be using, and just contemplate that picture. What colours to use? Which pens or pencils? For the perfectionists amongst us, starting with colouring sheets or pages is a great idea, because we can download and print off/photocopy multiple times so if we decide, two colours in, that we don’t like it, we can start again with a fresh page. Once we’ve developed a style, or gained more practice, we can move on to a book. This is the way I work with my perfectionist clients, who otherwise would never start, or stress themselves out further trying to create the perfect image before they even put pencil to paper.

So if you are a perfectionist, try starting small, map out what you want the end result to look like, and then set off on your journey.  Remembering, it’s perfect as you go, not perfect as you go!

Lots of people believe in the advantages of meditation but have a good deal of difficulty actually learning how to meditate.

It is important to understand that there’s a difference between meditation and concentration. The biggest problem with meditation for a good deal of people is that they aren’t used to sitting still for periods of time without lots of distraction. For instance, how many people can just sit quietly without feeling the need to put on the television?  Background noise, company, whatever we want to call it. We are so used to noise all around us that we often don’t feel comfortable with silence.

When we are willing to sit with silence, even for short periods of time, when we are willing to accept the ‘discomfort’ of not having noise around us, we feel like we can begin to learn how to meditate.

Meditation is often describe as simply the process of putting our full attention, our concentration, on whatever object we have chosen. If we’ve struggled with mantra meditations or breathing meditation techniques or a mindfulness bell recording then we may feel nothing can  help us to focus our attention in the current moment and reach a state of mental stillness.

Using brainwave entrainment (which is listening to sound frequencies for less than 10 minutes a day every day) means we don’t have to stop what else we’re doing, we don’t have to focus our attention in the current moment and we don’t have to actually ‘meditate’ or ‘learn’ to meditate.  We simply listen to the recording and train our brain to create the waves we need in order to move into the experience we want to have. Simple!

Whilst the majority of people concentrate on physical techniques to minimise pain, such as physical treatment of the region or medication that makes a chemical pain block, acquiring a mental approach to pain can be quite beneficial.
Chronic pain may also be the reason behind depression which further reduces quality of life.

Your anxiety may make you doubt yourself so much that you might even feel as if you’re not permitted to truly feel anxious.

These varieties of stress are short-term stresses and they can be normal. Long-term stress, also called chronic stress, is due to different stressful circumstance or events that last for a longer duration of time. With time, the chronic stress will start to affect your wellbeing in a negative way.

There are such a wide variety of meditations. Transcendental meditation is a procedure that is practiced for 20 minutes each day when keeping your eyes closed.

Guided meditation is just one of the very best meditation procedures that will assist you to reach deep relaxation and release negative emotions that are bothering you. It teaches you the way to practice meditation and enhance your quality of life. In principle, meditation is comparatively easy and can be accomplished anywhere.

Some of our guided meditations concentrate on cultivating creativity, others supply you with the chance to dive deep into your meditation practice, and there are those which provide the chance to explore and heal a specific emotional matter.

Our meditations are appropriate for all degrees of experience. They may teach you techniques required to help you cope with difficult emotions and stress or simply enable you to relax and release anxiety.