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As women, we have many stressors in our lives. One way to deal with these is meditation, which can do wonders for your mental, spiritual, and physical health.
Meditation is an intriguing, unknown territory to a lot of us. Though we know it’s the answer to a healthy life, a stress free life, and a positive life, many of us are still reluctant to try meditation.
So the big question here is ‘how do I meditate’? I have come across many a people who want to meditate but don’t for lack of a proper thought process or technique. So while I too am a work in progress, I would like to share a few tips to help to start meditating or to take your present level a notch higher.
Many of us think that we can’t meditate unless we reach a state of total inner silence which means a state where we have no thoughts. True, such a state will be blissful but it may not be possible to achieve it without practising for quite some time.
When we sit to meditate, it is natural to have thoughts, especially knowing that we shouldn’t! When you have a thought come up while meditating, then instead of fighting it or forcefully stopping yourself to think about it, just tell your mind lovingly that I will come back to this thought later and for now I am concentrating only on my meditative state. Do not try to forcefully push yourself into such a state.
For example, if a thought comes that you have to reach a certain place the next day by a certain time, then rather than comparing time, fare, convenience of metro vs cab vs driving, just tell yourself you will come back to this thought a little later and imagine that you have lovingly pushed the thought aside for now.
When we start meditating, many of us would do it regularly for a first few days but stop doing it after a few days. One of the main reasons is that we may be looking out for something amazing to happen during our meditation. A bright light to be seen, some sign to be shown to us, to experience God.
But when we sit to meditate with a focus to have certain experience, our whole attention is towards that and we end up not even feeling the calmness and contentment that meditation should bring to us. Even for people who have been meditating for years, not every time would they experience something that great. And meditation doesn’t mean that you would have a surreal experience every time.
To have a beautiful meditation experience, sit with a calm mind & faith and experience that very moment as every moment in itself can be a beautiful experience if we seek to feel it.
Since it’s difficult to sit in silence and work around having very less or no thoughts at all, one can try guided meditation. Guided meditation takes you through certain thoughts and visualizations and directs your mind towards a certain thought process. You can either continue with guided meditation or switch over to sitting in silence by your own once you have trained your mind to do that.
Yes, you can train your mind! Tell your mind very lovingly before sitting for meditation that you do not want it to wander and you would be concentrating on meditation now, and you will experience slowly how well this works.
If we fix up a time for meditation, there would be a higher chance for us to be regular at it. As otherwise many times we procrastinate, and not just by hours but by days. It’s a personal choice how many times in a week would you want to meditate but I personally feel that to start with even 3 days in a week should be good.
Every time that we meditate, there is a downpour of divine, pure, healing energy. If we meditate at the same place every time, that place/room will have more pure and divine energies which will help us to meditate better and deeper.
Yes, you need to set the mood right for this also! A few things that can be done before meditation are exercising /practicing yoga, breathing exercises, listening to soulful music, burning soothing oil/candle, remembering and thanking the Supreme Power for all the blessings that we have in our lives. Also, be careful not to meditate while experiencing emotions of anger and frustration as the energy that you have at that time gets magnified during meditation.
Meditation like happiness is a state of mind and when regularly practised, one will start to feel a surge of love, peace and happiness within. So, ladies, let’s take a leap of faith in ourselves and take out time from our busy schedules for the soul spa. Prioritize your schedule so that you would be able to meditate in peace. And even the law gives you a right to remain silent!
Image source: shutterstock
I am a management faculty by profession and left my full time job in June 2012 when I got diagnosed with breast cancer. I am perfectly healthy and fit now and run my own NGO ` read more...
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Women making compromises for the sake of their families is real; I have seen, heard and read about them. My family has been my biggest cheerleaders!
‘I suppose you will work after marriage?’ My (then) prospective mother-in-law asked a few minutes after we had met.
I was in the penultimate semester of my two-year MBA at IIM Indore. Amid lectures, libraries, badminton, extracurriculars, and placements, I somehow managed to discover my future life partner there. His parents had arrived in Indore from Lucknow to meet his choice and deliberate about blessing the marriage.
‘Yes, of course,’ I replied without blinking, trying to gauge her reaction.
I huffed, puffed and panted up the hill, taking many rest breaks along the way. My calf muscles pained, my heart protested, and my breathing became heavy at one stage.
“Let’s turn back,” my husband remarked. We stood at the foot of Shravanbelagola – one of the most revered Jain pilgrimage centres. “We will not climb the hill,” he continued.
My husband and I were vacationing in Karnataka. It was the month of May, and even at the early hour of 8 am in the morning, the sun scorched our backs. After visiting Bangalore and Mysore, we had made a planned stop at this holy site in the Southern part of the state en route to Hosur. Even while planning our vacation, my husband was very excited at the prospect of visiting this place and the 18 m high statue of Lord Gometeshwara, considered one of the world’s tallest free-standing monolithic statues.
What we hadn’t bargained for was there would be 1001 granite steps that needed to be climbed to have a close-up view of this colossal magic three thousand feet above sea level on a hilltop. It would be an understatement to term it as an arduous climb.
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