The goal of meditation isn’t to control your thoughts… it’s to stop your thoughts controlling you!
Meditation can truly transform the way you think and the way you feel about your everyday life in general, you feel more peaceful, more compassionate, happier, more in control and more focused. Probably most importantly, it will help you understand your own mind and stop all these automatic thoughts that take up so much of your time and energy.
Most individuals invest their time seeking purpose, searching for the meaning of life or aspiring to have freedom. But, truth be told, most individuals are looking in the wrong places!
… What you seek is inside of you and that is why it is important to take time each day to connect the head and the heart – through silence and meditation to enable us to ‘let go of the daily strains’ to ensure healthy brain function.
You don’t have to be a prisoner of your past. It was just a lesson … not a life sentence, so let it go!
Say what? Yes, even your most fearsome fears start with your mind. The brain is an incredible piece of machinery – but we can learn to tame it, and train it. And meditation is the key. Like a computer it benefits us from the time its turned off, and unplugged.
Meditation can change your brain structure in 8 weeks…
Calming and quieting the mind is a lot easier to achieve than you think, you just have to make the time for it. Anything that slows us down, and which helps to unclutter our minds, is a counteraction to the busy lives we lead. It’s good for our emotional, physical and spiritual health.
Too often you hear people say “Oh, I don’t have the time to meditate”. But the fact of the matter is that whatever helps you to achieve a relaxed state where you can let your thoughts just ‘be’ without getting tangled up is a very good thing!
It’s good for your wellbeing, and that is everything.
It is more beneficial to do ten minutes of meditation daily than it is to do a one-hour session per week. Meditation helps us to live consciously and purposefully and with personal integrity. It is the greatest tool we have at our disposal for connecting the head and the heart and the soul, so it’s a great skill to learn.
The benefits of meditation are numerous. Meditation:
- Releases fear
- Release stress and tension
- Reduces anxiety
- Relaxes the nervous system
- Relieves muscle tension
- Relieves insomnia
- Increase concentration and the ability to focus
- Increase energy and motivation
- Improve memory
- Improves depression
- Lowers blood pressure
- Normalises blood pressure
- Reduces cholesterol levels that decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease
- Slows down your cardiovascular system
- Restores balanced function to the digestive system, aiding absorption of nutrients
- Diminishes intensity of headaches or migraines
- And it frees your mind from self-doubt and internal chatter…
Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit….
There is nothing in this world that can trouble you more than your own thoughts, which is why it’s really critical to a mental state of being where you can simply be ‘the observer of your mind’. People expect meditation to be mindful silence – and yes, that really is the goal, but a lot of the time there’s mind chatter – it takes a lot for our minds to slow down. So, if you can sit, and allow your thoughts to flow – just let them roll – don’t hang on to them and don’t believe any of them, or let them lead you down a path of ‘thinking’ then you are doing yourself a great service.
It’s also possible that you may just be picking up on what someone else is broadcasting out to the universe. Most of the time the thoughts that just automatically come in, are not even yours. However, we tend to think they are ours and hang on to them for a while, we hug them, we squeeze them, until the thought has taken over our very existence.
If you can still your mind for just ten minutes a day, then the whole universe will surrender and be of service. You are the universe in ecstatic motion. To surrender is to take a step back and be the observer of your life, let your soul, or your higher mind guide you … it knows exactly where you are going and what you are meant to be doing. You just have to silent the mind long enough to hear the whispers and feel those little nudges, or as we call them these gut feelings or intuition that we ignore most of the time because our rational mind gets in our way.
Mediation practiced daily can generate:
- Optimism
- Self-esteem
- Confidence
- Motivation
- Self-acceptance
- Self-responsibility
- Self-assertiveness
You too can live more like a zen master…
Meditation is very simple, first you get comfortable, either seated or lying down. Create a space that you love and feel peaceful in. You might choose music. Or a guided meditation. You might choose darkness or candlelight, or sunshine under a big tree in a garden. It’s entirely up to you. The point of meditation is to ‘clear the mind’. However, because actually cultivating the ability to think of “nothing” is very difficult to achieve and takes many hours of practice, people feel like they don’t get the benefits of meditation and therefore they don’t do it.
So, here are some really cool tools to help you on your way, there is an app called Oak for a guided meditation, or if you prefer silence use Enso timer for meditation, it is awesome!!
Personally, I prefer to use binaural beats to work with my brain waves. And, although I prefer to do my meditation first thing in the morning, it’s impossible for me to stress hard enough, that whatever works for you … do it! There are no rules… except that some regular meditation – even just 10 minutes a day – is better than none, or an irregular practice.
So, do what works for you. Give your brain a rest, because remember, that even when you are asleep, it is still working. The only way we can slow it down is to do it consciously.
I promise, you will be amazed at the results. Meditation isn’t always easy or even peaceful. But it has truly amazing benefits, and you can start today, and continue for the rest of your life.
