Getting started with a simple meditation practice
You don’t have to be guru or commit yourself to a religion in order to enjoy the many benefits of meditation.
Meditation for beginners can start out as simple as taking three to five minutes of your day.
A dear friend lent me a book called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris a few years ago. I was at the start of my spiritual and personal growth spurt at the time and didn’t think meditation was for someone like me. I was too busy, life was hectic, my daily to-do lists were too crowded to find a few minutes to spare to pee, never mind meditate. So, I got about 20 pages into the book and decided it wasn’t going to work and returned the book to my well-meaning friend.
Boy, did I turn out to be wrong. I suppose I just wasn’t ready yet for the wonders that meditation would bring to my life.
Eventually, I was drawn to back to meditation and now make it a regular part of daily practices. Today, I would say it is one of the most powerful and profound practices I use to connect to myself and to oneness.
You might not be quite ready to connect to oneness yet, but maybe you feel drawn to help yourself let off some steam, destress, fight anxiety, and re-center your energy.
Follow these suggestions as a beginner to give meditation a try and slowly build into a practice that uniquely fits and benefits you.
- Choose a time of day when you will be undisturbed. Could be part of your before-anyone-is-up morning routine, or before you get out of your car to step into the office, or it could be right before bed. Give it a whirl when you have several moments of relative peace.
- Turn your phone to Do Not Disturb.
- Set the timer on your phone for 5 minutes if you’re afraid of getting too relaxed and you have a schedule to keep.
- Turn on gentle music on your phone or computer, no lyrics is least distracting. You can also use a free meditation app which will have both the timer and the music. My fave is Insight Timer. As you move into a more regular meditation practice, you can also choose guided meditations which can help you move away from distracting thoughts toward a narrated, guided meditative experience.
- Don’t stress. It’s nearly impossible to keep all thoughts out of your head. The idea here is to stay focused on the music, or a simple word in your mind (like peace, love, wellness), or to focus on your breathing. This is super helpful for most beginners. Keeping your thoughts focused on your breath, even counting during inhales and exhales if you find that works for you, can get you closer to the state of mental peace that you’re going for.
- Close your eyes (fewer visual distractions) and go!
You did it! That’s really all there is to it!
The timers are helpful, especially in the beginning, because you can release worrying about having your eyes and mind “closed” for toooo long. The 3 to 5 minutes you set for meditation will go by very quickly, so fast that you may be surprised when the timer bell goes off. I can almost guarantee that what happened to me will happen to you too – you’ll want more. You will move to wanting at least ten minutes in a session. Maybe even more.
It’s through meditation, or simply quiet time, that you can destress, decompress, and allow connection to your subconscious. If you’re interested, this is also a great conduit for connection to consciousness in general. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we’ll talk about that in another post!
Meditation has also been shown to:
- Reduce the stress hormone cortisol
- Boost your immune system
- Improve focus and productivity
- Slow age-related brain disease
- Reduce anxiety
- Lower blood pressure
For now, explore what quiet time or your meditation practice can do for you personally and how a regular, daily meditation habit might slowly change your life – much like it did mine.