The Art of Meditation by Tracy Morrow - HTML preview

Why Meditate?

You may already know why you want to start to meditate. Perhaps your doctor suggested it as a way to relieve stress or lower your heart rate. There are literally hundreds of benefits to be gained. Here are just a few:

• Increases grey matter concentration in the brain
• Regulates Moods
• Decreases depression, anxiety and other behavioral health challenges
• Improves psychomotor vigilance
• Enhances ability to generate gamma waves in the brain
• Reduces alcohol, substance abuse and other forms of self-medication
• Improves focus, attention, and ability to work under stress
• Improves information processing and decision-making
• Increases mental strength and resilience
• Increases emotional intelligence
• Increases pain tolerance
• Reduces pain better than morphine
• Improves memory and self-awareness
• Helps allocate limited brain resources
• Improves visuospatial processing and working memory
• Increases awareness of your unconscious mind
• Enhances creativity
• Significantly reduced risk for mortality, myocardial infarction, and stroke.
• Reduces blood pressure
• Decreases inflammatory disorders
• Decreases cellular-level inflammation
• Prevents asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease
• Helps treat premenstrual syndrome and menopausal symptoms
• Helps manage the heart rate and respiratory rate
• Reduces metabolic syndrome
• Creates a state of deep rest in the body and mind Increases feelings of compassion and decreases worry
• Decreases feelings of loneliness
• Reduces emotional eating

So where do you start?

One part of creating your own meditation practice will be to determine what the best time is to meditate.

Please don’t try to do this while driving or operating machinery!

Other than that, there are no hard rules with what time is the best to meditate.

You might find that quiet times of the day are the best to begin with. Some of us choose meditation as a lifestyle and practice it continually throughout the day. You may choose that path in your life as well, but at first choose at least one specific time during the day to begin.

Even one minute of deep meditation a day will show significant benefits, so do not sweat it if you feel pressured for time. As meditation becomes more important for you, you will find more time to practice.

Another question many beginners have is where to meditate. You may choose to create a sanctuary for yourself in a room or corner of your home. Sanctuary areas are nice, but not necessary. You can meditate at home, at work, in your bathtub, in your bed, on your coach, on the floor or in a park. Try to meditate in different environments and see what is most fulfilling for you.

Now that you know the why, what, when and where of meditation, take a few deep in and out breaths. Allow yourself to fully experience each breath. Feel the air coming into you, softly and naturally into your belly and then slowly and naturally let it back out.

Let your thoughts go here, there, everywhere, you do not have to mind them right now. Just return to your breath. Do this as long as you like. Repeat as often as you like.

This is the most basic form of How to Meditate. From this point, you can become the creator in developing your own art of meditation.