“Quiet the mind and the soul will speak”
– Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati
In our book ‘How to Rise – a Complete Resilience Manual’ we talk about meditation as an essential core skill in building personal resilience. Here we evidence it’s many physical and psychological benefits and offer a comprehensive guide as to how to get started.
Meditation is often coupled with mindfulness as a practice for enhancing wellbeing but the two are different from each other.
Mindfulness is a practice that involves using our senses to come into the present moment thereby avoiding projection of thought into the past or future and experiencing any negative emotions associated with that thought. In the present moment we are likely to be safe and if there is a problem, we are usually too busy dealing with it to become anxious.
Meditation always requires an altered state of awareness. We set the intention to invoke that state because we know that here is where we can process events and any emotions that are associated with them. We also know that we are more suggestable in this state of trance. EMDR and hypnotherapy are widely used to access and process memories of traumatic events and to make affirmations stick. Yoga Nidra is an ancient practice where we take a Sankalpa (an affirmation worded in a specific way) into a restorative pose where we will enter into this altered state of awareness so that the message is retained within our system of beliefs.
Meditation has been shown to have a beneficial effect on BP, anxiety, depression, sleep, pain and cognitive function. It is also demonstrated have created increases in positive emotions and behaviours.
Incorporating meditation into your daily ritual creates powerful shifts towards Self-mastery. Our delegates often express a reluctance to take time out of an already busy day to make room to meditate but on reflection, having made the changes, report that a busy day goes better when a period of ‘stillness’ is woven into it.
When we take time to gently bring our thoughts into a chosen place and ‘still’ or ‘calm’ them, we hear answers to questions that we did not know that we needed to ask.
There are countless articles on this site with meditative scripts to speak into your phone at their end. Below we have shared a handful of them along with others that will help you to polish your meditative skills or remove any resistance that you may have to regularly engaging in this most enjoyable practice.
To receive our two audio guided meditations as our gift to you CLICK HERE
For more insights on meditation and a host of tools and techniques for exploring the Self and improving your human experience see our book:
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