2018 is a great year to meditate

Meditation Monk

Now that 2018 is really here and we’re all settled into it, let’s reconsider our meditation goals.

There are so many ways to meditate, we can be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed. Should we light a candle or practice breathing or chanting? Should we be mindful? More aware? Less aware? Do we need a mirror? Incense? A place to be at one with ourselves?

I meditate on the train every morning.  Because I have my meditations downloaded onto my phone, I like to choose a different one each day, plug in my headphones and just listen.  It saves me having to listen to the beats escaping other people’s devices around me, lol!

Living in my own little world for 20 or 30 minutes while travelling lets me arrive at the office in a more relaxed and less stressed frame of mind.  And that can only be a good thing!

It also means that I’ve kept a commitment to myself, which is to meditate every day. And that’s a good thing too.

I’m not a fan of committing to things that I can’t actually do.  I don’t like setting myself up to fail. So if I have to sit on the train, I can make good use of that time and keep my commitment at the same time: that’s what I call a win-win!

What about you?  When do you meditate? Where can you carve out time just to sit quietly and listen to some words or music?  Or just to focus on being mindful. Leave a comment below about what time works best for you. It might help others….

Are you stressed about things that you feel are beyond your control?

Meditation Monk

Often, in our busy lives, we feel that everything is getting faster and faster. We’re running just to keep up with ourselves and nothing really seems to get done.

We know that life can be seen as a string of experiences, but nowadays it can seem like we have way too many experiences in one day!

What can we do to just stop and breathe, relax and simply experience where we are?

Stepping out of life for just a few minutes can help. Finding a quiet space, sitting still, breathing deeply for a few moments can all slow the carousel of life and allow us to take stock of what has been going on around us.

A simple thing we can do is write down in the morning what our intention is for the day ahead. What do we want to achieve?  What do we want to have experienced by the end of the day when we get back in to bed?  Where can we fit that achievement or experience in during our busy day?  Will we agree to give ourselves that moment, when the time comes?

Only we can make time for ourselves.  And when we do, one of the things we can consider is what is actually beyond our control?  And then release that, because we cannot fix what is beyond our control so stressing about it achieves no useful purpose. But focusing on what we CAN control, like setting aside time for ourselves to relax and breathe deeply, can help us immensely.

Don’t Learn to Meditate

Meditation Monk

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!

Concept Meditation

Meditation Monk

Have you considered concept meditation (for example, focusing on the idea of impermanence or increased creativity)?

Here at MeditationMonk we like concept meditation. Listening to sound frequencies for 6 or 7 minutes to change brainwaves will give us the result of meditating on a particular concept without us having to spend a great deal of time and focus on the particular way we want to feel.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that if we want to feel creative, or focused, we can listen to a meditation that contains a low Beta tone for helping to promote focus and a high Alpha tone to reduce frustration and increase creative flow.

After listening to these sounds for 6 or 7 minutes, our brains start to copy the frequencies they hear and create waves at the same frequency. We thus move into this state easily, without sitting still and focusing on creativity.

If we wanted to promote healing, we might use a combined Alpha and Theta session for a stress free meditation session which will aid the immune system. Or a sub-Delta frequency that supports healthy blood pressure by soothing the Amygdala and Hypothalamus.

We are always interested in creating new meditations so if there’s anything you’d like us to create or you want to listen to, let us know.

The Advantages of Meditation

Meditation Monk

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.