How to Meditate for Beginners

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This article was co-written by Masha Kouzmenko. Masha Kouzmenko is a meditation coach and co-founder of Silicon Valley Wellness, a company based in the San Francisco Bay Area that provides holistic health education services such as mindfulness meditation and yoga lessons to young adults. enterprise. She has over five years of experience teaching meditation and yoga, specializing in guided meditation techniques. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Meditation is often beneficial for individuals who practice it regularly and on a daily basis. There are many reasons for people to want to calm their mind, such as wanting to quell the turmoil in their mind, understand themselves better, find peace of mind and feel the life around them, meditate and think according to their needs. depth, or strengthen beliefs. Whatever your reason for wanting to meditate, remember that getting started and motivating yourself is never easy.

Table of Contents

Preparation phase

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Think about what you want to gain from your meditation practice. People start practicing meditation for a variety of reasons – like perfecting their thinking and creative abilities, visualizing a goal, removing the noise in their mind, or even creating a mental connection. sacred. If your only goal is to take a few minutes each day to quiet your body without worrying about anything about what you’re doing, that should be enough of a foundation for you to practice meditation. Don’t overcomplicate the reason for meditation. In a deeper sense, meditation is about relaxing and removing everyday worries from the mind.

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Find somewhere quiet and undisturbed. Especially if you are a beginner in this method, it is important here to make sure that the place where you intend to practice meditation is free of any distractions. Turn off the television and radio, close the windows to block out the sounds of the trees outside, and close the doors to keep out roommates’ noise. If you share a room with someone or share a house with your family, you may have trouble finding a quiet place to concentrate. Ask the members you live with if they are willing to keep quiet during the time you practice. Don’t forget to promise them that you’ll let them know as soon as you’re done so they can resume their normal activities.

To add excitement to the meditation experience, a scented candle, a bouquet of flowers, or incense are great tactile cues.
Dimming the light or turning the lights down will help you focus more.

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Use a meditation cushion. This mattress is also known as zafus. Zafu is a circular cushion, and you can sit on it when placed on the ground during meditation. Like the chair, this mattress will have no backrest. Therefore, you are not allowed to sit down and lose focus on your energy. If you have not prepared zafu, the cushions on the old sofa or pillow also become a savior, helping you to avoid pain during the long stretching process to sit cross-legged.

If you feel back pain when sitting without support, sit in a chair if you want. Try to keep your body in a comfortable position and sit up straight so that your back feels comfortable. Then, lean back until you feel you can keep practicing again.

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Wear comfortable clothes. Of course, you don’t want anything to pull you out of your focused state of mind. Therefore, avoid wearing tight clothing, like jeans or tight pants. Instead, choose clothes that you normally wear to exercise or to bed — loose and breathable clothing is considered a smart choice.

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Choose a time to practice when you feel refreshed. As you get used to the practice of meditation, use this method to stay calm whenever you feel anxious or stressed. But if you are a newbie, you will have a hard time focusing at first because your mind is not yet properly shaped. So if you’re just starting out, practice meditation when you feel comfortable – if possible, your first session should be early in the morning or after you’ve relaxed from a long study or hard work schedule.

Get all the wandering thoughts out of your head before you sit down to meditate. Before training, if you are hungry, have a snack or go to the bathroom if you are in need.

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Prepare a stopwatch. Do you want to make sure you practice meditation long enough, but don’t want to disrupt intense concentration by testing the time? Set the stopwatch to the time you want to exercise — whether it’s 10 minutes or 1 hour. Your phone may also have a timer for training sessions, or you can find online sites or apps about setting a time for practice. ^{[1] X Research Source}

Meditation Stage

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Sit on a meditation pad or chair while keeping your back straight. Sitting up straight will help you focus more on your breathing as you inhale and exhale. If you are sitting in a chair, try not to lean back or stoop. Keep sitting as straight as possible.

Put your feet in any position that feels comfortable. You can straighten them out in front of you or cross them like a pretzel if you’re sitting on a pad. The most important thing is that your sitting posture should always be kept straight.

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Don’t fret about what to do with the hand. On the news channels, we often see people holding hands and resting on their knees when meditating. However, if that position makes you feel uncomfortable, don’t worry too much about it. You can clasp your hands and hold them in your lap, or let them hang loose at your hips, or whatever, as long as you make sure your mind is relaxed and you’re fully focused on your breathing.

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Slightly tilt your chin as if you are looking downwards. It doesn’t matter whether you open or close your eyes when you meditate, although many people believe that closing your eyes will prevent visual distractions. When you tilt your head slightly as if you are looking down, it helps to open up your chest and make breathing easier.

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Set timer mode. Once you’ve found a comfortable sitting position and are ready to start, set the time when you want to meditate. For the first week, don’t feel pressured to try to achieve transcendental meditation for about an hour. However, start the exercise in a short time of about 3 to 5 minutes and increase the amount of time to half an hour or more if you want. ^{[2] X Research Source}

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Close your mouth while breathing. ^{[3] X Research Source} During the meditation, you should inhale and exhale through your nose. However, make sure your jaw muscles are also relaxed even if you don’t open your mouth. Instead of clenching your jaw or gnashing your teeth, let’s relax.

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Focus on breathing. ^{[4] X Source of Research} This is also all at the heart of meditation. Instead of trying to ‘no’ thinking about things about everyday life that stress you out, direct yourself to focus on something more positive, like breathing. By paying full attention to the way you breathe in and out, you will find that all wandering thoughts about the outside world will automatically disappear without you having to worry about how to ignore them. them aside.

Pay attention to how you are most comfortable breathing. Some people focus on how the lungs expand and contract, while others think about how air passes through the nasal cavity when breathing.
You should also focus on the sound of your breath. Direct yourself to a state where you are fully focused on some aspect of your breathing.

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Watch the breath, avoid analyzing it. ^{[5] X Research Source} The goal here is to keep the body comfortable with each breath, not to describe it in detail. There is no need to worry about how you should remember how it felt or explain your breathing experience later on. Enjoy every breath in every moment. Then enjoy the next breath. Try not to think about breathing in your mind – instead, do it through your senses.

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If your breathing is rambling, refocus on it. Even if you have a lot of experience in meditation, you still find that sometimes the thoughts in your head wander somewhere. You will start thinking about work, bills, or errands you have to do tomorrow, for example. When you feel that the outside world is creeping into your mind, don’t panic and try to find ways to ignore it. Instead, gently direct your focus back to the sensation of the breath in your body and distract other wandering thoughts.

Perhaps it will be easier for you to maintain your focus on inhaling rather than exhaling. If that’s true, keep this in mind at all times. Pay special attention to the sensation of breathing as it exits your body.
Try counting your breaths if you’re having trouble refocusing.

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Don’t be too hard on yourself. Acknowledging and maintaining intense focus can be overwhelming for a beginner like you. Don’t beat yourself up – remember all newbies experience a feeling of inner turmoil. In fact, some individuals consider that constant return to the present moment is part of the “practice” of meditation. Furthermore, don’t expect that practicing meditation will change your life in an instant. To fully focus on something, you need a lot of time. Maintain meditation practice for at least a few minutes a day and stretch it out if possible.

Advice

Make sure your phone is set to silent mode.
Meditating before going to bed will help your brain pause and help you feel more relaxed.
Meditation is not a magic method, but a protracted process. Try to meditate every day, and you will slowly find that a state of calm and peace is developing within you.
Enjoy soft music that will help you relax more deeply.
Focusing on the breath or reciting the OM mantra is a common practice. However, if you want to listen to music while meditating, choose a soothing, relaxing genre. A song that has a light tempo at the beginning but then switches to a rock tempo in the middle is not appropriate because it disrupts the meditation process.
You will probably taste failure in every episode. Live with it – for failure will teach you to better understand yourself as well as learn a quieter part of meditation. Go boldly forward and become an important element of the universe.

Warning

Be wary of any class or organization that asks you to pay a large upfront fee to learn meditation. There are many people who have already enjoyed the benefits of this subject and will gladly teach you for free without asking for any money.
You may experience hallucinations and some of them are really horrible. Stop practicing immediately if that happens.

Things you need

Comfortable and loose clothes
Meditation cushion/pillow
Stopwatch

Steps

Preparation phase

Meditation Stage

Advice

Warning

Things you need

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