When we meditate, we inject far-reaching and long-lasting benefits into our lives: We lower our stress levels, we get to know our pain, we connect better, we improve our focus, and we're kinder to ourselves. Let us walk you through the basics in our new mindful guide on how to meditate.
So you’ve decided to start looking after the health of your mind by meditating. But where to begin? How to get started? What are the basics? How will it feel? What to expect? All perfectly normal questions, and, lucky for you, we’re here with the answers you need to get started.
Most first-time meditators find it strange to sit in silence, to sit with their innermost thoughts and feelings, to sit and do nothing — the very things that, funnily enough, the mind tends to resist. To a beginner, meditation might initially feel a little alien, perhaps even daunting, but that’s okay. People have been meditating for around 3,000 years, and many have doubtless experienced the same reticence, trepidation, or wonder that first-time meditators often feel.
Meditation is simple to learn and involves some fairly straightforward techniques. Before getting started, let’s take care of a few practicalities and answer some everyday questions.
Meditation for beginners is easier than you think. Try out these powerful meditation tips to start your mediation habit and see the immediate benefits today.
When you think of meditation, what images come to mind?
Do you imagine a monk sitting in an uncomfortable position for hours at a time? Do you get the feeling that meditation is boring and tedious?
We welcome you to our Mindful guide to meditation, which includes a variety of styles of meditation, information about the benefits of each practice, and free guided audio practices that help you learn how to meditate and incorporate meditation into your daily life. Keep reading to learn more about the basics of this transformative practice that enables us to find more joy in daily living.
Meditation Tips and Techniques
We’ve gone over the basic breath meditation so far, but there are other mindfulness techniques that use different focal points than the breath to anchor our attention—external objects like a sound in the room, or something broader, such as noticing spontaneous things that come into your awareness during an aimless wandering practice. But all of these practices have one thing in common: We notice that our minds ARE running the show a lot of the time. It’s true. We think thoughts, typically, and then we act. But here are some helpful strategies to change that up:
How to Make Mindfulness a Habit
It’s estimated that 95%of our behavior runs on autopilot. That’s because neural networks underlie all of our habits, reducing our millions of sensory inputs per second into manageable shortcuts so we can function in this crazy world. These default brain signals are so efficient that they often cause us to relapse into old behaviors before we remember what we meant to do instead.
Mindfulness is the exact opposite of these default processes. It’s executive control rather than autopilot, and enables intentional actions, willpower, and decisions. But that takes practice. The more we activate the intentional brain, the stronger it gets. Every time we do something deliberate and new, we stimulate neuroplasticity, activating our grey matter, which is full of newly sprouted neurons that have not yet been groomed for “autopilot” brain.
But here’s the problem. While our intentional brain knows what is best for us, our autopilot brain causes us to shortcut our way through life. So how can we trigger ourselves to be mindful when we need it most? This is where the notion of “behavior design” comes in. It’s a way to put your intentional brain in the driver’s seat. There are two ways to do that—first, slowing down the autopilot brain by putting obstacles in its way, and second, removing obstacles in the path of the intentional brain, so it can gain control.
