what is meditation and how does someone do it?
In: Other
Meditation is like giving our mind a little vacation. It’s when we take some time to sit quietly and focus on something simple, like our breathing or heartbeat. This helps us relax and clear our head of all noisy thoughts that can sometimes make us feel stressed or overwhelmed. Our mind is like chatGPT, doing an enormous number of calculations to create what we call thoughts. Meditating, at least the way I do it, focuses on feelings (which came before the thinking part of our brain developed), and lets the chatGPT part of our brain rest for a few moments.
To meditate, we find a comfortable spot where we won’t be disturbed. We can sit or lay flat, whatever feels best. Then, we close our eyes and start paying attention to our breathing or heartbeat. We don’t need to change how we breathe; we just notice it (although I prefer to breath out slower than breathing in, to trigger the parasympathetic feverous system). When thoughts pop into our head (and they will!), we gently label them and bring our focus back to our breathing.
It’s a bit like exercise for our brain. Just like we exercise our body to stay healthy, meditation helps keep our mind healthy and calm. The more we practice, the better we get at it.
Lately, I’ve been exploring personalized guided meditation, which has been a game-changer for me. I chat with a website about a specific issue I’m facing, and it generates an audio guided meditation based on the chat. For concrete problems, it works unexpectedly well. For the bigger issues, I’m still working on it.
‘Deconstruct’ and ‘reframe’ meditation techniques are particularly helpful for me to see a problem I face from a new perspective, and wire it to a different emotional response. These approaches help break down complex issues and look at them in new ways, which can be really powerful for dealing with stress and challenges in our lives.
Lots of different ways to meditate, but they all strengthen our mind.
Latest Answers