Due to the fast pace of the modern world, making time to relax and focus has become a difficult task. Even when we make time, we often feel as though we can’t truly relax and live in the moment. Our mind wanders to our struggles, our busy schedule, our conflicts, and our worries. A truly healthy mind requires training to be able to accomplish that kind of focus. Learning the skill of meditation is a great way to achieve a high level of focus and control over your mind. It has a variety of benefits to reveal if you are willing to take the time to develop the skill.
For years I thought meditation was kind of woo-woo. I also thought it sounded really boring. Yet every time I listened to an interview or read a memoir of a super successful person, they almost always mentioned meditation. I slowly began to want to give it a try and knowing my short attention span I started with guided meditations so I would begin to understand the process and the intention.
Short Periods of Meditation Are Beneficial Too
One thing that people don’t realize, is that you don’t need to sit for hours in a quiet room to meditate properly. Meditation can be done in almost any place where you feel comfortable, and you can spend mere minutes meditating if that is all you have time for. This will train your mind to get used to coming into a period of meditation with a lot less production. When you have mastered these short meditation periods, feel free to delve deeper into this amazing and rewarding practice.
I began my meditation practice with the popular app HeadSpace. I make it a habit to get to work about 20-30 minutes early for a variety of reasons and I often spent that time sitting in my car scouring Facebook. When I decided to try meditation it was that before work time that seemed to make the greatest sense. I decided to do a 5-10 minute meditation every morning and right from the very first day I was hooked. I felt good all day long and pretty soon people were telling me that I seemed peaceful, happy, and more smiley. A morning meditation seemed like a very small thing but the benefits were not small at all. I was walking into work every day feeling like a freaking rockstar. Woo woo? No, “Woohoo!” is more accurate.
Work Your Way Up to Longer Periods
Once you have gotten used to meditating, you’ll find that you have a much easier time sitting down and getting into a focused state of mind. When you have the time, begin increasing your meditation periods by increments of 3 – 4 minutes. This will extend your stamina for meditation and take you into deeper levels of concentration. There you can find a sort of clarity that is less commonly available during normal conscious hours. You can either focus on specific ideas, or simply repeat a mantra, but the mental benefits will be noticeable over time.
The Many Benefits of Meditation
It’s clear that meditation can help you to reach new levels of relaxation, help you to mull over ideas and decisions, and concentrate on specific things, but what else can it do? One of the major changes that you go through after meditation has become a common practice for you, is that the relaxation that you experience will help to improve your neurologic functionality. It makes your brain work better. It can reduce stress (and thus improve your health), make you more self aware, increase acceptance, optimism, and happiness, and improve moods and memory retention. More and more scientific benefits are attributed to meditation each year but all one has to do to see the proof in the pudding is start…with five minutes, and see where it takes you.
