Meditation can present some difficulty for beginners.
You may not know very well whether you are doing it right, feel anxiety, constantly get distracted, or encounter difficult feelings and thoughts during practice. Normal! Thinking about it, we describe below 5 tips to help those who are starting.
1. Find the best posture for your Meditation
Finding and being in a comfortable posture is paramount and essential to meditation. Only then will we allow the mind to calm down.
Meditation is a process of finding comfort – both physical and emotional and mental. For this, you can sit on a meditation pillow, on a straight chair, or on a stool suitable for meditation.
Try the different possibilities and choose the one that is most comfortable for you, because if meditation is painful, chances are good that you will give up the practice.
2. Silencing the mind is not something that will happen
Silencing the mind can happen for yogis or extremely experienced practitioners. But it is not the goal and it is not what happens for most people. Even those who have been meditating for years.
In practice, what happens is that by sitting comfortably and bringing attention to our breathing and our body, we allow the mind to focus on the present moment and calm down – away from ruminations about the past or anxieties about the future.
Know that there will be thoughts and distractions, and when they come, gently just bring your attention back to your breath, and come back to the practice
3. Simplify
During meditation, try not to question yourself or rationalize so much about whether you are doing it right or wrong. Meditation is easier to do than to explain. It’s a simple moment of pause to breathe consciously, feel our body and be kind to ourselves.
Maintain posture, presence, and gentle attention to your breath.
4. Find the balance point for Meditation
I like a metaphor I heard in a class and that remains with me to this day: Practicing meditation is like holding a soft bucket full of water: If you squeeze or tense too much, the water overflows and if you let go too much, the bucket falls over.
That is, the goal is not to be hyper-concentrated, but we also don’t want to be there without purpose, without attention.
Trust yourself, remember that there is no such thing as a right or wrong, good or bad meditation and that just sitting down and doing it is wonderful.
5. Meditation is your space and yours alone – Allow yourself to feel!
Permission and kindness are essential to the practice of meditation!
This is extremely important to say because we can tend to reject involuntary thoughts or negative feelings and criticize ourselves for doing so. Remember that your meditation is your well-being, welcoming and healing space. It’s your moment of self-knowledge and permission to welcome all sensations.
If such thoughts or feelings are present, don’t reject them, don’t criticize yourself – be kind to yourself, look at them with warmth and welcome, then return your attention to your breath and let them go. Be with yourself in your entirety, not rejecting any part of yourself.
Come back to the stillness of the breath, come back to the body, and come back to the practice.
Starting to meditate will bring you multiple benefits and we hope, with this text, to have helped you on this journey. In this other article, we talk about the different types of meditation.
Good habits!
Start meditating.
