• By practicing relaxation techniques on a daily basis, we learn to let go of the unhealthy emotional states that lead to the arising of physical tensions. Meditation includes a strong element of bodily relaxation. To begin to understand how this works you can listen your relaxation CD and note how you feel.

• You can learn how to directly affect your mental states, promoting calmness and contentment. Learning how your body and mind interact will help you to influence your mental states by changing your posture and breathing. The mindfulness of breathing will also help you to use your breath as a way of
• Calming yourself in the moment.

• Meditation will help you with anger management. The Metta Bhavana (development of loving kindness) meditation can also help you to manage stress and emotions more effectively, and help you develop your self-esteem and self-confidence (something that quickly becomes eroded under stress).

• Meditation can teach you tools to dispel anxiety, ill will, and self doubt. Changing states from one of anxiety or ill will towards self or others is a key to understanding the benefits of working meditation into your life.

 

You need to decide when you're going to meditate and stick to that time. If you plan your week, then plan your meditation into your week to make sure it happens. It's too important to leave to chance and you want to avoid potential self sabotage in failing to set a plan in place.

Although we suggest that you can meditate anywhere, like the office, it can be good to have a particular place to meditate regularly, and to make that place a little special, meaningful, and beautiful. You can do this by having some pictures that remind you of why you want to meditate – like natural imagery. Find what works best for you.

There's no one best time to meditate. Many people find it useful to get up a bit early and meditate before the pressures of the day mount up. They want to prepare for the day so that things go well. Other people like to meditate before going to bed in order to "unwind." Both can work.

There are wonderful benefits of meditating before you start your day. There are powerful benefits for clearing the mind through meditation before going to bed. There are huge benefits of meditating right after a vigorous cardio workout! Whatever best suits you, we’d like to invite you to try all different times and see what gives you the greatest benefit.

The idea that you should listen to music while meditating is very common. It probably goes to seeing meditation as a means of relaxation. Of course meditation does help you to relax, but it goes beyond that and helps us to be more alert and focused. Music & guided imagery can assist us; however, it’s not something that you need to meditate. 

If done mindfully, anything can be a meditation in itself, just as walking or washing the dishes can be. You can take many activities and make them richer and more satisfying by taking more awareness into them. Music, as we've seen, is just one example. If you're going to listen to music as meditation then try not to do anything else at the same time. Don't work, or read, or balance your checkbook while you're listening. Just listen to the music. Sit or lie down comfortably, and just pay attention to the music. You'll probably find that you enjoy it like never before.

 

Meditation in a busy place:

Call to mind the living, breathing, feeling human beings behind the music and wish them well. And then accept that noise as part of your meditation practice. Stay loosely focused on your breathing, and let the noise be a sort of secondary focus of the practice - if you stop seeing the noise as the enemy of the practice and instead see it as part of the practice, then the conflict will vanish.

Trying to fight the noise is unlikely to work. The noise is not going to go away because you don't like it. If you respond aggressively to it then you're just getting yourself into a fight that you cannot win. There are many creative ways to deal with outside distractions and noises when meditating. There is the coffee pot in the morning, or the dishwasher, or someone flushing a toilette. There are people on cell phones or talking. There are penetrating voices in the doctors offices. These are all places you can meditate, however, the distracting noises may seem prohibitive. They are not if you can find creative ways to make peace with them.

How? Perhaps allowing the noises to be where they are and letting them create a background presence to your inner meditation. In almost “no time” you will find they are drifting to the background as your meditation begins to draw you deep into it’s centre.

Noticing the breath, the in and the out breath, and the tiny spaces before and after each, taking notice of each breath it’s differences, almost like a thumb print, every breath is different. Starting to notice the differences….now stop this process and notice the noise.

You can see how far away it was becoming Good, go back to the breathing again, and let it become the focus. As we see our focus is the very thing that takes us away from noise or distractions. Focus….meditation….breathing….

Mindfulness can be seen as the practice of "being in the moment"

Actually, being in the moment means being truly aware of what is going on right here and now, in our experience. Much of the time our experience does not have this quality of awareness or mindfulness. A lot of the time we are like robots, automatically living out habitual patterns of self-pity, anger, wish fulfillment, fear, etc. These habitual tendencies take us over and run our lives for us - without our being able to stand back and decide whether this is what we actually want to be doing

 

When we're in this robotic state, we're not aware of what's going on. We're fearful without being aware that we are fearful or that we have an option not to be fearful. Our internal chat and dialogues send our emotions into all kinds of frenzied experience. Often we aren’t making ourselves very happy at all.

Being in the moment is just another way of saying that we are aware of what is going on in your experience, you are not just being fearful but are aware that you are fearful and are aware that you can choose to be otherwise. Of course a lot of the time when we are not being in the moment, we are literally thinking about the past or present. We might be dwelling on the past - brooding about some past hurt. Or we may be fantasizing or projecting a about a future in which we imagine all kinds of terrifying experiences that have not even occurred yet!.

Often these pasts and futures are not real pasts or futures, but simply fantasies of how things might be or of how we would have liked them to have been. And as with all unmindful activity, we have no awareness that this fantasizing is pointless. All that it does is reinforce unhelpful emotional tendencies that can never truly enrich our lives.

 

There are, of course, ways of mindfully thinking about the past or future. Being in the moment does not mean that we are stuck in the moment either. We can mindfully and creatively call to mind past events, or imagine what might happen in the future. We can think about the past and think about how we might have acted differently, or wonder why something happened the way it did. We can think about possible futures, and of how the actions that we commit now will make those futures more or less likely. When we are reflecting about the past or future while being in the moment, we are conscious that we are reflecting. We do not confuse fantasy with reality. We don't stray from thinking about the past in order to construct imaginary pasts in which we said or did the right thing - or if we do so then it's part of a conscious thought experiment to see what we might learn from the experience. We think about the future, but it's not idle rather an attempt to find a creative goal into which we can grow.

 

Sometimes imaging can be creative. It can be wonderful to relax the reins of consciousness and allow our creative unconscious mind the opportunity to express itself. But it's generally far more useful to have a part of our conscious mind standing by, observing, watching for any sign that the creative expression of the unconscious is turning gray - turning into the repetitive and reactive expression of old and unhelpful emotional patterns. The conscious mind can intervene at such moments with a light touch, a gentle redirection of our mental energies so that we stay in the present; aware, mindful, and creative.