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Meditation and Mindfulness the Easy Way
Need to quiet your mind? To relax a bit? To get your thoughts together? Here’s the punchline: it’s REALLY easy. And you know how to do it. And you do it all the time.
Meditation is quite simply any mechanism that quiets the mind. How does it do that you ask? By focusing the mind on something specific in order to get it “off” all the other racing thoughts. That’s literally it. There’s nothing wrong with guided meditation and naturally many people use it. But there are a ton of other ways and we all practice them regularly.
Do you enjoy cooking? Exercise? Reading books? Dancing? They are all a form of meditation – you get focused on the activity at the “expense” of everything else. And the mind gets a break and stops wandering/cycling/whatevering. Cool huh? Any hobby is a form of meditation. As is prayer. As is yoga. As are a million other activities. If you don’t have something to get your mind off of the daily grind and the challenges of life – find something. And do it.
Mindfulness is the act of being present in a moment and not focusing/thinking about unrelated things. You don’t have to work too hard at it – it’s what you do when you’re meditating! Because the entire point of meditation is to get you to mindfulness. Meditation is the vehicle, mindfulness is the destination.
The KEY (this is the reason guided meditation is so successful) is that you dedicate the time and your focus to the activity you’re doing. It’s a conscious decision that “This time is for me. Period. The rest of the world simply doesn’t exist for the next hour or however long the activity will take”.
Long story short, choose or find something you enjoy. Make time to do it regularly and when you’re doing it, focus on it and nothing else. You owe it to yourself.
If you’re interested in some empirical data on the benefits of mindfulness, take a look at this article by the National Library of Medicine. For more information on the benefits of meditation, here is what Harvard Medical School has to say on the subject.