See you in your Free Session on Tuesday 8:15pm
4 ways to Meditate
1. Breath awareness meditation
Breath awareness is a type of mindful meditation that encourages mindful breathing.
Practitioners breathe slowly and deeply, counting their breaths or otherwise focusing on their breathes. The goal is to focus only on breathing and to ignore other thoughts that enter the mind.
As a form of mindfulness meditation, breath awareness offers many of the same benefits as mindfulness. Those include reduced anxiety, improved concentration, and greater emotional flexibility.
2. Mindfulness meditation
Mindfulness is a form of meditation that urges practitioners to remain aware and present in the moment.
Rather than dwelling on the past or dreading the future, mindfulness encourages awareness of a person’s existing surroundings. Crucial to this is a lack of judgment. So, rather than reflecting on the annoyance of a long wait, a practitioner will simply note the wait without judgment.
Because mindfulness is a theme common to many forms of meditation, it has been extensively studied.
Research has found that mindfulness can:
reduce fixation on negative emotions
improve focus
improve memory
lessen impulsive, emotional reactions
improve relationship satisfaction
3. Body scan or progressive relaxation
Progressive relaxation, sometimes called body scan meditation, is meditation that encourages people to scan their bodies for areas of tension. The goal is to notice tension and to allow it to release.
During a progressive relaxation session, practitioners start at one end of their body, usually their feet, and work through the whole.
Some forms of progressive relaxation require people to tense and then relax muscles. Others encourage a person to visualise a wave, drifting over their body to release tension.
Progressive relaxation can help to promote generalised feelings of calmness and relaxation. It may also help with chronic pain. Because it slowly and steadily relaxes the body, some people use this form of meditation to help them sleep.
4. Loving-kindness meditation
Loving-kindness meditation is also known as Metta meditation. Its goal is to cultivate an attitude of love and kindness toward everything, even a person’s enemies and sources of stress.
While breathing deeply, practitioners open their minds to receiving loving kindness. They then send messages of loving kindness to the world, to specific people, or to their loved ones.
In most forms of this meditation, the key is to repeat the message many times, until the practitioner feels an attitude of loving kindness.
Loving-kindness meditation is designed to promote feelings of compassion and love, both for others and oneself.
It can help those affected by:
anger
frustration
resentment
interpersonal conflict
This type of meditation may increase positive emotions and has been linked to reduced depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress or PTSD.