We understand that recent times have been marked by considerable stress, change, and unpredictability, leading to heightened anxiety and a strong desire for a sense of normalcy. How have you been managing the array of emotions you may be encountering?
Even before current challenges, you likely encountered discussions about meditation as a strategy for addressing anxiety. Meditation, in its simplest form, involves learning to pay attention. When practiced effectively, it enables you to slow down your thoughts, observe your surroundings without judgment, and diminish the incessant worries that may be occupying your mind. This, in turn, fosters a sense of calm and equilibrium, empowering you to concentrate and make well-considered decisions.
Meditation for Beginners
If you are unfamiliar with meditation the word likely conjures up the image of a room filled with people sitting cross-legged repeatedly chanting a word or sound. However, mindfulness meditation allows the individual to become aware of the present moment. In this way, you might think of mindfulness as one step on the path toward meditation.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction tool is to learn to detach from anxious thoughts. This is achieved by practicing awareness, identifying tension in the body, understanding your thinking patterns, and learning how to deal with challenging emotions.
Steps for Mindfulness Meditation
- Sit upright in a chair, and place your feet flat on the floor.
- Begin paying attention to your breath. Don’t try to change how you are breathing; observe your body as you inhale and exhale.
- You might feel your focus shift elsewhere. If this happens bring your thoughts back to focus on your breathing.
- Anxious thoughts may pass through your mind. Acknowledge them, but then bring yourself back to awareness of your breathing.
- Continue this quiet, nonjudgmental observation for about 10 minutes.
- Open your eyes and notice how you feel. Don’t evaluate, just observe.
When you’re first getting started, try to carve out a few minutes each day to practice this meditation. You can gradually increase that time as you learn how to relax and discover what it feels like to be calm. In making this part of your routine you may notice that this practice may spill into other areas of your life, as you notice yourself observing rather than reacting during difficult situations or times of stress.
Obstacles to Meditation
There are barriers to meditation that are created by our feelings of impatience. It is very common to feel like we don’t have enough time to sit still and think “I have too much to do, I can’t waste my time observing how I breathe” especially if you are someone who is always on the go (like many of us), or just can’t seem to stop the negative thoughts from getting in the way.
The best way to overcome these obstacles is to try to understand and accept that learning this is a skill, like any other and this takes time. It truly does take practice to learn to do nothing and be quiet, but like with all new things with practice, it will become easier, so don’t give up!
Another way to ensure you practice this regularly is to schedule it in your day like any other appointment. Be kind to yourself and make this part of your routine like brushing your teeth. You may be very surprised to see that when you’ve fit in time for a quiet moment, you may find afterward that it helped you to return to your day more centred and better at problem-solving and allowed you to be more productive.
We hope you give it a try and encourage you to keep a journal of your progress.