Health

Meditation For Beginners: 5 Easy Steps


Research tells us that meditating can relieve stress and anxiety, it can boost your creativity, increase your focus and support you through relationship problems. If there are so many benefits to meditation, why aren’t we all doing it every day?

For a long time, I told myself  that one day I’d start meditating. One day…

It took a few years before I actually got serious about it, and I wish I would have started a long time ago. You don’t need special meditation cushions, or mala beads around your neck. You don’t need meditative crystals or Buddha holding your hand. All you really need is an open mind, a quiet space, and a few minutes.

meditationart

1. Keep An Open Mind

“I’d be soooo bad at meditating. I’m way too ADD for that!” If you start off with this kind of attitude, chances are that you will indeed have a hard time meditating. You’ve already told yourself you can’t do it. But if you switch your perspective, if you instead approach it with an open mind, with fearlessness and curiosity, you might notice that with a little bit of practice, and a lot of patience, your mind actually does start to become quiet and your inner meditation queen comes out.

positivity

2. Start With Just A Few Minutes A Day

Meditation can be done for two minutes or for two hours. But most of us don’t have time to fit in very long meditation practices, and the truth is that when you first start, any more than even 20 minutes could be difficult. So set a timer for 10 minutes and give it a try. Remember, even just 10 minutes of meditation a day is better than zero a week.

meditate in nature

3. Create An Inspiring Space

When you have a quiet, inspiring place to meditate, you’ll find that you make more time for it in your week. This doesn’t mean you have to own your own temple or travel to the top of a mountain to find solitude. An inspiring place can be in front of the window in your bedroom, or under the tree in your backyard. You can create an inspiring space by lighting candles, printing out pictures of the people or places you love, or by having inspiring quotes around you.

inspiring space

4. Use A Guided Meditation App

So, you have an open mind, you’ve created a spare 10 minutes in your day, and you finally found a quiet, inspiring space to meditate in. You sit down, close your eyes…and then what? Luckily for you, there are many online resources and tools available to help you become a meditation superstar.

Headspace (https://www.headspace.com/)

Stop, Breathe & Think (http://stopbreathethink.org/)

5. Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself!

I’ll admit that the first few times I tried meditating, it didn’t quite work out.

Noises in the background caused me to lose focus, my sister walking into the room caused me to be embarrassed, and my dog crawling onto my lap caused me to laugh. My mind was always wandering and even when using an app, I found it hard not to think about other things going on in my life. There were many days when I wondered if I was even doing it right? Remember that this is totally normal, and that you’re doing your best. Meditation is a practice, it takes time to develop the skill, but when you get to that sweet spot where your mind is focused and all anxiety has washed away, you won’t regret the steps you took and the effort you put into developing your own meditation practice.

red heart

 


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2 thoughts on “Meditation For Beginners: 5 Easy Steps

  1. Hi,
    I’d like to order the copy of Faze with Jenn’s mediation article in it. Would you please give me the issue number or date?
    Thanks.

    1. Hi Kathy, this article was a web only article by the fabulous Jenn, published just a couple weeks ago. Thanks for asking. FZ