Meditation is about attention and mindfulness. It’s the process of focusing on our breathing until we anchor ourselves in the now. Meditation can be a way to lower stress. It can help with processing and understanding complicated emotions such as pain. Have you ever gone to bed at night and couldn't sleep because you seemed to have a million thoughts that just wouldn’t go away? Meditation gives us time to address these thoughts. Life can be so busy, so it's important to take some time to really listen to yourself.
Meditation has a major impact on our spiritual and emotional wellbeing. For emotional wellbeing, it can calm the stress and anxieties that we pick up throughout the day. It brings us a deeper connection with ourselves. It creates space in our lives, lets us truly consider things and make better choices. As for spiritual wellness, meditation is a very holistic practice. It lets us connect to the wider world and universe. Mediation can even be used as a religious practice. Meditation can affect our wellness in the short term and lead to long-lasting better changes in our lives.
The first step to meditation is making yourself comfortable. This means taking a seat or lying down. It helps to set a time limit, especially for beginners, 10 minutes is a realistic time frame for meditation. Limit all distractions, it's difficult to meditate in a busy or noisy place, so pick somewhere where you can really focus on yourself. Then, you need to focus on breathing and the pattern as your breath goes in and out. Your mind is going to wonder, but that’s okay, try to bring attention back to mediation if you can. Don’t stress out over your mind wandering, just let it happen and let the thoughts flow. It takes lots of practice to really engage with mediation. At first, your mind will be so busy, it may not be the most effective wellness tool. It takes time to be able to get the benefits of mediation, but a big part of this is patience and learning.
I’ve tried mediation and struggled with it in the past. It could be that it wasn’t the right self-care tool for me, or maybe I just didn’t have the patient. Meditation takes time and effort to really reap the benefits from it, and not everyone is in a place where they can dedicate that focus to it. That being said, I have done things like meditation for self-care. Simple things like long baths where I sit there calmly and focus on my thoughts. When under a lot of stress, I have my techniques to calm the business of my mind and find my focus. I know it's not quite mediation, but it uses a similar principle and really has helped me.