Learning to Meditate

Learning to meditate is a bit like riding a bike, once you've learned how to do it, it is a process you'll have access to the whole of your life.

But how should you start learning to meditate?

There are lots of meditation tutorials available on the internet, so these can be a good place to get started as long as they're not complicated with lots of jargon. Most are good and take the time out to explain any terms they are using so that beginners can understand them.

When you are initially learning to meditate it is very important to choose a meditation method that's easy to learn.

One of the best is a breathing meditation, a walking meditation or, if you prefer, a "high tech" meditation like Centerpointe where all you need to do is sit down and play a CD.


Once you've decided on your meditation method, you should try it out for at least a week or so to see whether or not it is right for you. If you are doing well, then keep going with it, but if you don't like it, it is best to try another method instead.

As with everything else in life, not everyone gets on with everything. There's nothing long with changing if you don't like a specific method.

Humans are creatures of habit so you should try to meditate at the same time each day. Set aside a specific time of the day when you are most likely to be able to carry out your meditation practice. Perhaps first thing in the morning, or when you come home after a hard day's work

Learning to Meditate takes time, so if it doesn't seem to be working for you initially, give it some time and you should soon start reaping the benefits.

Ten Minute Meditation For A Relaxing Energy

Try this easy yoga and meditation routine to relax your body and energize your mind. Each pose can be done now at your computer. In other words, don't wait to "relax" when you are done working...DO IT NOW!!!!

With this meditation you can really increase your relaxation!!! It is convenient and really does work. It is all about getting your mind and body in "that zone".

Start out in a cross legged or any seated position. Pull you shoulders up, back, and then down. Lift your chest up to the sky, and contract your abs. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Use the back of your throat to create that raspy sound to control the air flow and prevent hyperventilation. When you breathe in through your nose, stick out your tummy. Stick it way out. Just like a baby when he breathes in. Visualize how a baby breathes, it's perfect. Then contract it back in when you breathe out through your mouth as if you are protecting yourself from a punch.

Lifting up through your cage, pull your chin in and open up the back of your neck. Now make a conscious effort to relax your hands, feet, and face muscles. You are going to start concentrating on your breathing. In through your nose, and out through your mouth.

Close your eyes now for three minutes or so now while using this "diaphragmatic breathing technique". After you open your eyes, rub your hands together then place them over your eyes for another two minutes give or take. When you open your eyes again, slightly lean forward...then back.....then to the right......then to the left.....then center yourself.

Close your eyes again for 2 more minutes and think of someone you love. Then dedicate this meditation to them. When you open your eyes for a third time, place your right hand over your forehead, as close to your skin as you can, with out actually touching it. Make small circles around that area.This area represents your "inner voice". Some people call it Gods voice or intuition.

Close your eyes and keep using the diaphramatic breathing technique and visualize a high vibrational energy made out of cool blue light breathing in thru that inner voice space on your forehead. Clearing it and opening it. While you breathe out thru your mouth, visualize any low vibrational energy or negative energy coming out. Open your eyes after 30 seconds.

You are then going to take your left hand over your throat and do the same thing and know that this area represents your self expression and confidence. 30 seconds with your hand over this area.

Ok, now take your right hand and place it over your heart. Know that this area represents peace, love, and harmony. Open this area up. Now close your eyes and do the same thing. Close your eyes for 30 seconds with your hand over this area.

Now take your left hand and place it over your solar plexis (Diaphram) and know that this area represents your confidence and strength. Imagine yourself strong and confident. Remember to continue imagining the high vibrational energy/light breathing in that area. Close your eyes for 30 seconds with your hand over this area.

Now your right hand goes over the area between your belly button and pubic bone. Breath in that high energy, remember out thru your mouth. This area will represent order, organization, and cleansing. Close your eyes for 30 seconds with your hand over this area.

Lastly, put both hands over either knee. This will represent your foundations. Visualize your home, school, social circles, etc.... as strong and supportive. Close your eyes for 30 seconds with your hands over these areas.

Now, close your eyes one more time for several minutes if you like and visualize yourself with the following gifts as if you are looking at a snap shot of yourself: a. intuitive b. self expressive c. in harmony and joy d.strong, very strong and confident e. in order and organized and f. in a supportive and friendly home, community , and universe.

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Gina Cool is the owner of http://www.CoolfitnessYOGA.com . She considers it an honor to help people get fit in mind, body, and spirit. She has been in the fitness industry for over 15 years. She has a BA in kinisiology.

Learn to Live with Meditation-Born Awareness.

Learn to live more superconsciousiy. This means to live with meditation-born awareness. Try to make the peace you experience in meditation the basis of your objective experience of life. Do not let the meditative peace slip between your fingers the moment you find the winds of worldly duties again hit you.

Do not let the insistent demands people make of you blow away your calm self-awareness. Never let others define you in their terms. You should live by what you believe and know of yourself, inwardly. Your abiding reality is the peace, love, and joy you have experienced in your own soul.

Meditation will sharpen your concentration and develop your will power. Obstacles of many kinds will simply disappear, and you will be able to accomplish in minutes what in the past might have taken you hours, days, or even weeks to do. By practicing meditation, many had found that by coming to work with a clear mind they could solve problems on which others would have spent days.

For intuition, the natural fruit of meditation has one supreme advantage over the reasoning faculty: It provides inner certainty. The rational mind can never be quite sure of anything. The best it ever does is decide on which, out of a variety of possibilities, seems the best choice. Great discoveries and accomplishments are the consequence, always, of some measure of intuition.

Learn to look at life more with a sense of unity. Do not try to analyze everything. Obviously, there are situations where analysis is necessary, but even then, cling to a deeper consciousness of the interrelationship of all things. Be guided, above all, by inner joy. The more you let yourself be guided superconsciousiy, the more you will feel joy in everything you do. You will reach the point of understanding that, if that quiet, inner joy is missing, anything you contemplate doing were better left undone. And when inner joy is present, it will be your way of knowing for a certainty that what you contemplate is right and good.

The Mind of a Meditation Beginner

The greatest meditation teachers advise that the best attitude to take toward meditation is an open mind, completely free from all preconceptions and expectations. The goal of meditation is not to accumulate knowledge, learn something new, or achieve some special state of mind, but simply to maintain this fresh, uncluttered perspective.

"If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything," Zen master Shunryu Suzuki writes in his book called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. "In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind, there are few." As the title of his book suggests, Suzuki teaches that beginner's mind and Zen mind - the awake, clear, unfettered mind of the enlightened Zen master - are essentially the same. Or, as another teacher puts it, "The seeker is the sought; the looker is what he or she is looking for!"

No matter which meditation technique you choose, try to practice it with the innocent, open, "don't know" spirit of beginner's mind. In a sense, beginner's mind is the non-attitude underlying all attitudes, the non-technique at the heart of all successful techniques.

Awareness of your Thoughts During Meditation

Are you aware of your thoughts during meditation? If you are a beginner of meditation, you may sometimes feel overcome with your thoughts when practicing. The important thing is not to become caught up in them. Do not be like a weak swimmer who gets swept away by a strong current. Stand mentally on the bank, and watch the current flow past you. Be calmly observant of the flow, but still mentally detached from it.

Imagine that the bank on which you stand is situated at the the back of your head. There in fact lies the seat of ego consciousness. From that position, watch your thoughts and feelings flowing by you. Realize, as you watch, that not only your thoughts but your very perception of what is important keeps passing.

Nothing in life, neither your inner thoughts nor your outer circumstances, is firmly fixed. If any thought, feeling, or circumstance seems permanent to you, it is only because it has become snagged, temporarily, on a protruding rock of attachment. In a spirit of freedom, allow the current to release it from the rock.

Create Your Own Meditation Mantra

You may find it helpful to create your own mantra to use while you are meditating. But how to you go about creating a mantra?

First start by singing or humming the vowels in any way that occurs to you, at any volume, speed, or pitch. Feel free to change the order after a while (u-e-a, for example). Change the pronunciation however you like, for each sound has a dozen or so different ways of being said. Your preferences are important and may change with the time of day, according to how tired or energetic you are, and according to whether the sound is external and audible or purely internal and audible only to the mind's ear.

Select two vowel sounds, a-u, e-o, or any combination you prefer in this instant. Say that sound over and over softly, in a kind of chant. Let the sound become quieter over the course of several minutes and simply enjoy the rhythm of the sound, the vibrations in your head and throat, the subtle movements of your tongue, and the flow of the breath. Your eyes can be open or closed, and you can go back and forth between open and closed. At some point in the next several minutes let the softly audible chant become an internal chant. Let this transition happen in its own time, gradually.

When the chant becomes internal, it may change in various ways. Sometimes it continues as before and you are simply listening to the sound mentally. The chant can fluctuate in volume, from being loud and distinct in your inner hearing to being soft and faint. Then it may fade away, leaving you there listening to the silence, or to the absence of sound. Welcome this nothingness, or blank space, or "forgetting," and train yourself not to panic or to think you have failed when your mind goes silent. At some point there will probably be little interludes, little quiet spaces between sounds in which you can feel your body vibrating.

As you listen inwardly to the sound or sounds in a restful way, you may notice relaxed feelings coming over you, alternating with thoughts about what time it is, what you have to do next, and any worries you have. Train yourself to welcome this process, then gently return to the vowels.

Use this simple exercise to cultivate your sense of preference for sound, and in particular to heighten your appreciation of how beautiful the vowels are. Give yourself the freedom to discover what you love about sound, both inner sound and thoughts, and the sounds we use in speech. You may discover that you love the space before speech when you are looking for an appropriate word or sound to express what you are feeling, or possibly the silence after speech, when you have said something. The essence of meditation is to discover, not impose.

How to find a Meditation Instructor

If you would like to play tennis but do not know how, what do you do? To start with, you can watch other people play, maybe buy a book or two, and then head out to the court yourself and start practicing. But once you have mastered the basics, you may want to take a class or get some personal instruction to help you refine your stroke or eliminate the mistakes you have picked up along the way.

The same holds true for meditation. Sure you can practice the exercises that you have learned for weeks, months, or even years and reap the benefits without additional instruction. But at a certain point, you may encounter difficulties you do not know how to handle by yourself, or you may start having spiritual experiences that give you glimpses of a greater reality and stimulate your appetite for further exploration. In order to continue to move forward and refine your meditation practice, you need to find yourself a good teacher.

Before choosing the right kind of teacher, you need to know exactly what kind of teacher you want. Most meditation instructors have a particular spiritual affiliation such as yogis or Zen Buddhists or Christian contemplatives, for example. In addition, the instruction they offer includes a particular orientation toward the spiritual journey as well as particular teachings and terminology. It should not be any problem if that is what you are looking for. But if you want your instruction straight, without any spirituality, you may have a more difficult time finding a suitable teacher.

Some yoga teachers offer basic meditation instructions with a minimum of Sanskrit words, and they may even know the territory well enough to help you if you get stuck. Nowadays, more and more adult education programs, community colleges, and local churches are offering generic meditation or stress-reduction classes. However, you may want to look over the instructors’ credentials before you enroll because he or she may be no further along in practice than you are.

You might want to check out the Vipassana tradition of Buddhism, also known as insight meditation. Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of the bestseller “Wherever You Go There You Are”, a long-time teacher of Vipassana, and also the founder of the mindfulness-based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, has developed a program that offers rigorous training to prospective instructors of basic mindfulness practices.

Making Time for Meditation

Meditation resembles sex in a number of ways, and this is one of them: You may prefer it short and quick or long and slow. But whatever your predilections, you would no doubt agree that some sexual contact with your beloved is better than no sex at all.

Well, apply this dictum to meditation, and you'll get the drift. If you can't schedule a half hour, then meditate for a few minutes. It's much better to sit for five or ten minutes every day than for an hour once a week - though you may want to do both. As with all the guidelines in this book, experiment with the different options until you find the one that suits you best.

Digital alarm watches provide an accurate and inexpensive way to time your meditations precisely without watching the clock. Also, you might like to signal the beginning and end of your meditation with the sound of a small bell, as is done in many traditional cultures.

Five minutes: If you're a beginner, a few minutes can seem like an eternity, so start off slow and increase the length of your sittings as your interest and enjoyment dictate. You may find that by the time you settle your body and start to focus on your breath, your time is up. If the session seems too short, you can always sit a little longer next time. As your practice develops, you'll find that even five minutes can be immeasurably refreshing.

Ten to 15 minutes: If you're like most people, you need several minutes at the start of meditation to get settled, a few more to become engaged in the process, and several at the end to reorient - which means that 10 or 15 minutes leaves you a little in the middle to deepen your concentration or expand your awareness. Once you've made it this far, try leveling off at 15 minutes a day for several weeks and watch how your powers of concentration build.

Twenty minutes to an hour: The longer you sit, the more time you'll have between preliminaries and endings to settle into a focused and relaxed state of mind. If you have the motivation and can carve out the time, by all means devote 40 minutes or 1 hour to meditation each day. You'll notice the difference - and you'll understand why most meditation teachers recommend sitting this long at a stretch. Perhaps it's the human attention span - look at the proverbial 50-minute hour of psychotherapy or the optimal length for most TV shows.

But remember: It's better to keep your practice steady and regular than to splurge one day and abstain for the rest of the week.

How to Sit Still For Mediation

When talking about the practice of sitting still, one of the great meditation teachers, the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, used to say that the best way to show a snake its true nature is to put it in a hollow stick of bamboo. Take a moment and give this unusual metaphor some thought. What could he have possibly meant by it?

Well, imagine that you're a snake in bamboo. What does it feel like? Every time you try to slither, which is after all what snakes like to do, you bump against the walls of your straight as-an-arrow home. If you pay attention, you start to notice how slippery you actually are.
In the same way, sitting in a certain posture and keeping your body relatively still provides a stick of bamboo that mirrors back to you every impulse and distraction. You get to see how fidgety your body can be - and how hyperactive your mind, which is actually the source of your body's restlessness. "Maybe I should scratch that itch or answer that phone or run that errand." For every plan or intention, there's a corresponding impulse in your muscles and skin. But you'll never notice all this activity unless you sit still.

The funny thing is, you can sit in the same position for hours without noticing it when you're happily engrossed in some favorite activity like watching a movie or surfing the Net or working on a hobby. But try to do something you find boring or unpleasant - especially an activity as strange and unfamiliar as turning your attention back on yourself and following your own breath or paying attention to your own sensations - and suddenly every minute can seem like an hour, every ache can seem like an ailment of life threatening proportions, and every item on your to-do list can take on irresistible urgency.

When you're constantly acting and reacting in response to thoughts and outside stimulation, you don't have a chance to get to know how your mind works. By sitting still like the snake in bamboo, you have a mirror that shows you just how slippery and elusive your mind can be.

Keeping still also gives you a tremendous edge when you're working on developing your concentration. Imagine a heart surgeon or a concert pianist who can't quiet her body while plying her craft. The fewer physical distractions you have, the easier it becomes to follow your breath, practice your mantra — or whatever your meditation happens to be.