Meditation for Beginners

Meditation is a hobby where people learn to relax and concentrate properly. Usually, people try to concentrate on just one thing until they do not think of anything else but that one object. This may sound simple, but many people find it hard. In our modern world, there are so many things that we think about even while we are doing one thing. This is why meditation for beginners is important.

Meditation allows you to become peaceful and calm from the inside. You will be able to relax better and your body will feel more rested because of this. Also, it reduces stress and tension. Stress can cause many illnesses and problems, so getting rid of it through meditation can be very beneficial.

Aside from relaxation, meditation can also help you improve your concentration. You learn how to focus your attention on one thing at a time without straining yourself. By meditating often, you can learn how to focus on anything that you need to concentrate on. This will help you be efficient in doing a task so that you will not get distracted.

While you meditate, you will also learn more things about yourself that you probably didn’t know before. Since you will be calm and relaxed, you can hear what you are thinking about deep inside and you will be able to address these thoughts better. You will be more self aware.

Here, we will look at a technique that you can start out with for your meditation. Before you meditate, you will need to go into a room where you are alone. Tell others that you want to be alone, turn off all gadgets including your cellular phone or make sure that they are in another room. Sit in a comfortable chair, or straight on the floor. Remember to sit comfortably but not too relaxed since you could fall asleep if you are not careful.

The next thing you need to do is relax and close your eyes. Breathe calmly in and out. Do not think of anything buy focus on your breathing. Count your breaths and keep all other thoughts out of your mind. If you catch yourself thinking of other things, then start counting again.

Continue to do this for five minutes or until you have breathed in your one-hundredth breath. Then slowly open your eyes and get up from where you were sitting. Keep calm and take everything in. You can start to return to what you need to do for the day, but try to stay relaxed and calm during your day. With your new focus and awareness, you may find yourself being able to do your activities faster.

This is just one technique of meditation for beginners. As you progress in your meditation, you can start doing more complicated exercises. But to master this technique, you will have to be able to concentrate on your breathing and only your breathing for a very long time. Once you have mastered the basic techniques, you can begin advanced techniques and further your meditation.

Meditation can sometimes be confusing for beginners, since there are just so many different techniques for you to choose from and so many different ways to do them. A lot of people get lost in the many different guides out there and start out with advanced techniques before setting the basics in. This can lead to frustration, which is definitely not the point of meditation techniques for beginners.

This is why it is important to start out with techniques that are meant for beginners to lay the foundation of your meditation techniques. After you’ve finished mastering the basics, you can start to do more advanced meditation techniques and get farther in your meditation.

One meditation technique that beginners should learn is counting your breath. You should learn how to focus and think about your breath as it goes in and out of your body. This will help keep you in sync with your bodily rhythm. You may not be able to focus on your breath right away, and you may get distracted. It is completely normal, though. After a while, it will be natural for you to concentrate easily.

To start, sit down and breathe in and out slowly and carefully. Close your eyes and think only about your breathing. Breathe naturally and just think about how your breath is passing through your body. From your nose, to your throat, to your lungs, and back out again.

After you’ve figured out your breathing pattern, start counting your breath. One count going in, two going out, three going in, and onwards. It is natural to start thinking about outside things after a while, so when you catch yourself doing this start counting again from the beginning.

Soon, you will feel your breathing getting slower and deeper. You will breathe from your stomach and not from your lungs. Notice how your breathing changes as you get deeper into your meditation.

Try to count as far as you can go, and stop at around one hundred. Once you’ve gotten this far, open your eyes and slowly get up. Then stretch and do something else with your newly relaxed body.

The other meditation technique for beginners that will be discussed is flame meditation. It is similar to breathing meditation, but with an added twist in the form of a candle. Firstly, get a candle and light it in a room. Dim your lights, but don’t turn them off completely. If the flame bothers you or hurts your eyes, you can replace it with another object like an apple or a glass.

Place the candle at a small distance in front of you, and sit down. Close your eyes and do the breathing meditations exercise. In between a few breaths, open your eyes and look at the flame or the object. Don’t think about it, just stare blankly at it. Continue breathing carefully and stare at the flame for ten or more minutes, depending on how long you would like to meditate.

Next, close your eyes and visualize the flame or the object for as long as you can. Then open your eyes and your exercise is done. With these two meditation techniques for beginners mastered, you can start on more advanced techniques.

Many people assume that meditation for beginners is a tool to realize inner peace or relaxation. They assume it is a means to an end. And while meditation has countless mental and physical health benefits, if it is undertaken for these reasons it will probably not produce any of them.If meditation for beginners is treated as a means to an end, it will result in the same frustrations and discontent that led them to meditation in the first place. The reason? If desire and self centeredness is the root cause of our detachment from reality, of our discontent, then how does following another selfish desire (the desire to rid myself of such desires) lead to selfless experience of the now?

Let me elaborate a little more. If I meditate because I believe it will do something positive for me, this belief is a reflection and manifestation of my ego. I have an idea of myself. I have an idea of the world. These ideas have nothing to do with truth and reality, which is here and now and new and fresh. So when I try to experience the now by following my own perceptions and ideas of the past, I will only be following an illusion, an illusion I created.

True meditation is not a means to an end; it is the end and the means. It is the act of living in the now, without interpreting or analyzing according to our own dead constructs of reality. In order to meditate then, it is essential that ‘we’ are not present. It is essential that I have no motive, no goal or end in mind. It is essential that I meditate just to meditate. It is its own end.

This is easy to say, but to actually ‘be’ in the present without ‘you’ being in the present is much harder to accomplish. Most of us don’t realize the extent to which we construct our own perception of reality. Looking past that construct is exceedingly difficult if we don’t see that we’ve constructed it, and that it isn’t real.

Furthermore it requires the perception that our identities do not produce happiness. Once we perceive this fact in its glaring truth, our conscious associations become more obvious to us, and so too, their consequences in our lives. If we don’t see the we, by virtue of simply being who we have created ourselves to be, are causing our own pain and discontent in the world, than we will never be able to fully let go of our identities, and experience the beauty of mindful meditation.

And so, as we discussed in the last post, meditation for beginners must begin with the most basic element of life…breathing. Leave your ‘self’ behind, and simply observe the truth in front of you as it comes and goes, energizes and passes away.

Meditation for beginners typically starts with simple observation of, and control of, ones breathing. And while I am not a big supporter of adherence to meditation rules, breathing itself is fundamental to meditation, on occasion being one and the same.Regardless of whether we’re discussing mindfulness meditation or other forms of energy meditation like qigong, deep abdominal breathing is the starting point for two reasons. The first is because it’s the natural forgotten state of breathing from childhood, and the second because it’s a vehicle for reunion with the present.

Deep abdominal breathing, as opposed to upper chest breathing, is the natural forgotten method of breathing from childhood. If you watch a baby or young child sleeping, you’ll notice their chests don’t expand and contract, their bellies do. This is a source of energy and vitality, and one of the reasons children have so much energy when they’re awake. We can relearn this skill, and find our lost energy sources from childhood by practicing deep abdominal breathing.

The second reason meditation for beginners begins with breathing is because our breath is constantly changing, fluctuating, flowing in and out. It is not a stagnate state of being, but dynamic and immediate. By observing our breath, becoming fully aware of its inhalation and exhalation into the lower abdomen, we are reuniting with the present. Our breath is here now, and when we are aware of it, we are in the here and now. This is the basis of awareness, mindfulness and meditation.

Deep abdominal breathing should not be forced, but should be deep and long, within reason. And inhalation should be relatively close to exhalation in duration. One’s spine should be straight, shoulders upright, and atmosphere clean and conducive for relaxation. Nature and music may be a great help for some people. Other factors like hand position or leg position are inessential. Comfort is key, so long as your posture allows you to take a full long breath other factors needn’t be dogmatically observed.

Once this simple practice becomes second nature we begin to realize a great number of other health benefits. We experience higher energy levels, more relaxation and patience, lower blood pressure, faster healing, a stronger body, and a sharper mind. And while these are not our motivation, motivation being antithetical to true meditation as mentioned in meditation for beginners, it is hard to ignore and appreciate such positive results.

As much as I don’t believe in religious or spiritual dogma, I do recognize the need for guidance in realizing the truth in our own lives, as well as hidden potential. And once we have a start and begin to see for ourselves, our teachers and assumptions should be abandoned as our own guiding light takes over. Because when all is said and done, meditation for beginners and experts alike is not about a ‘thing’, it is about our own being and experience, something we alone can know and discover.

Ironically, meditation for beginners can be more harmful than beneficial if undertaken the wrong way. Most of us seek inner peace, beauty, happiness. And for most of us this desire is the root cause of discontent. Many religious leaders and teachers pass on traditional forms of meditation that does little but put the students mind into a new box. Because true meditation has no form, and it has no structure, when people ‘learn to meditate’ they typically wind up chasing a new desire, rather than find the peace they were searching for.That is not to say that there are not beneficial techniques or suggestions, like observing ones posture, not meditating while hungry, and doing so in a healthy and quiet environment. But it is to say that meditation is not a ‘thing’ with which to become good at, as if it is any other skill. Often times, beginners are at an advantage because they are not weighed down by worthless dogma or structured practice.

Meditation for beginners ought to look no different than anything else you do during the day. It ought however to feel different. Rather than eat your breakfast, you should taste your breakfast. You should smell the fragrance, listen to the sounds of rumination, and watch yourself as you are. And you should do all this without judgment. There is no right or wrong. There is only the truth of your experience. When you can taste your breakfast, I mean taste it as if it’s the first time you’ve eaten that thing, the first time you’ve eaten anything, than you are beginning to meditate.

Notice here I didn’t say anything about sitting under a tree with legs crossed and tuning out all external distractions. These are images at cross purposes with true self discovery and happiness. There is indeed a place in life for solitude and sitting quietly with oneself, but forced ‘meditative’ practice is not meditation. If you are forcing the thing, it winds up being a selfish action, an action emanating from your ego’s perception of good and bad, right and wrong. It comes from judgment.

True meditation is not judgment; it is the experience of life before the mind judges it. Before the mind ‘knows’ it. Many people misconceive this as detachment from reality. In actuality it is non-attachment, not to be confused with detachment. We leave behind the conscious and unconscious associations we’ve developed over a lifetime, we leave behind the ‘me’, and we experience the now. We don’t experience it as US Experiencing; there is only the experience, the smell, the taste, the sight, the thought. And there is beauty, and peace, and happiness.

Mindfulness, awareness of life in its fleetingness gives birth to selflessness and love. It opens avenues in the soul that we haven’t known since childhood. An innocence and an energy we all have and suppress is finally allowed to manifest itself again. And so today, for those of you out there looking for information on meditation for beginners, do yourself a favor, stop looking, and listen, look, taste, and feel. Start with breakfast.