10 mins Of Meditation With Lenka

What is meditation?

Meditation is a state of being rather than doing. Meditation is a state you slip into, a bit like when you drift into sleep and, just as sleep can be anything from a light nap to dream-filled deep slumber, so meditation can be experienced in many ways and on many levels, with more or less intensity.

“Meditation has been shown to be able to play a part in relieving a host of mind-made illnesses – from anxiety to heart disease.” Dr Malcolm Carruthers

Meditation is a practice

A few people – usually advanced meditators – find their minds turn inwards with ease and settle quite naturally into stillness, but the vast majority of us need to employ techniques to help quieten our minds and reach meditation.

By sitting in a meditation position and trying to focus our attention, with or without the help of any particular technique, and by making an effort to let our thoughts be without engaging with them, we are practising meditation. Even if nothing seems to be happening, even if instead of quietening down our minds seems to be going into overdrive, inner work is going on. Patient persistence will sooner or later be rewarded with deep meditation.

When we first begin to meditate and turn our attention inwards it can be a shock to realize just how unruly our minds are. Most people are unable to focus for more than a moment or two before they find themselves miles away, carried off on trains of thought and mental chatter – idly thinking about work, the people in their lives, going over old scenarios or envisioning new ones, having imaginary conversations, making plans…

A common, but misguided response to this is to try to forcefully subdue the mind. This is soon followed by the discovery that it does not work. The mind is like a monkey in that it has all manner of means to distract.

Meditation is the practice of gently bringing your attention back to your chosen focus or technique whenever you notice it has wandered.

The health benefits of meditation:

• Improved overall health
• Boosting the immune system
• Relief from stress and stress-related conditions
• Emotional well-being
• Decreased levels of anxiety
• Anger and depression
• Increased energy
• Greater creativity
• Self-confidence and self-esteem
• Increasing creative abilities and improving performance
• Slowing down the ageing process…

Click below for 10-minutes of guided meditation with me 🙂

What are your goals?

The goals you set for yourself in meditation affect your experience of it. The higher your goals, the more intense the process of purification as the inner spring-cleaning gets underway. Similarly, difficult relationships can intensify before they move on and improve.

The fact that you meditate does not mean your fraught relationship with your wayward teenage daughter will be transformed overnight or that her behaviour will change. But it does encourage better communication and helps you to accept people for who and what they are as opposed to who and what you want them to be.

The reasons people take up meditation are diverse. Surveys indicate that most of us practise it to relax, de-stress and boost our health, though in the course of regular practice our aims often undergo a subtle transformation, becoming broader and often more spiritually oriented.

Source: The Spirit of Meditation by Erica Brealey