How To Meditate: A Beginners Step-By-Step Guide To Meditation

If you are new to meditation, you may be wondering what meditation is, and whether or not it would be something worthwhile for you to do. After all, it seems that meditation is getting more and more popular these days.

It used to be that meditation was seen as some kind of a weird thing almost equivalent to witch craft or voodoo. But scientists have proven through doing Electroencephalography (EEG) tests of the brain that meditation can improve the brain-wave states and mood of a person almost instantly. The mind becomes calmer, cortisol (stress) levels are reduced, and serotonin (feel good hormones) levels increase. With today’s technology, they can see that the ancient wisdom is true.

Additional benefits are:

• Decreased stress
• Decreased depression
• Decreased anxiety
• Pain reduction
• Better sleep
• Increase in overall quality of life

But that’s not all…

Recent neuroscience research has proven that meditation not only helps a person to retain brain cells, but gain new ones. In other words, if you meditate, you won’t lose your memory when you get older!

Which Meditation Style is Best?

There are many different types of meditation methods. There is guided meditation, yoga meditation, mindfulness meditation, spiritual meditation, focused meditation, transcendental meditation and more. If you are brand new to meditation, simply finding a guided meditation video that you like on YouTube with a length of about 20 minutes is good to start with. Guided meditation is best if you are totally new to it.

But learning to do it on your own is even better…

Best Time to Meditate

The best time to meditate is soon after you wake up in the morning. The reason why that is the best time is because you haven’t had much time to start thinking worrisome thoughts yet! You’re starting fresh, and it will help you throughout the day to not think stressful, worrisome thoughts.

Remember, according to the Law of Attraction, stressful, worrisome thoughts attract stressful, worrisome events in your life, circumstances and even people. So, the more cool, calm and collected you can be, the better…

How to Meditate

All of us have about 60,000 thoughts every single day, and most of them are not positive! Typically, we fill our heads with thoughts of worry, stress, doubt, concern, fear, maybe even anger, despair and more. But meditation can help to alleviate all of those negative emotions.

One of the main points and goals to meditation is to quiet your mind. When you quiet your mind, you automatically raise your vibration, or how you feel. It may be difficult at first, but with practice, you can do it.

Step 1: Prepare Yourself and Your Environment

First, you may want to eat a little something beforehand and use the restroom so that your immediate needs are met. Then, find a place where you will not be disturbed for about 30 minutes. Make it dark but it doesn’t have to be completely dark. You may also want to get an eye mask to block out all of the light.

You’re going to need a comfortable chair because if you lay in your bed, you may fall asleep during the meditation. Although falling asleep is not a bad thing, you can’t take advantage of the benefits of meditation if you do.

In addition, you’re going to need some kind of a timer. You can find different timers on iPhones or on Android phones. Or, you could just use an old fashioned timer. One free timer for meditation is called “Insight Timer.” With it, you can set background music or sounds, and even have bells that ring at certain intervals. It’s really up to you as to what works best. Just keep in mind that you don’t want any background sound to be too interesting because it could be too distracting.

Another thing you may need are earbuds to plug into your phone or computer. They help to lower any outside noise that may distract you as you listen.

Step 2: Sit and Quiet Your Mind

Do you have your timer close by? Your eye-mask? Great! Now, sit in your chair, turn the timer on, and close your eyes.

Now comes the fun part!

The goal is to quiet your mind for at least a minute or two at first. But the thing is, your mind will be so used to thinking all of the time that you won’t be able to stop it at first. That’s normal!

This is why you could slowly repeat to yourself something like “Don’t think” over and over, or some other mantra like, “relax,” or some word that you like. When you do start to think a thought, don’t worry. Just let it go. See the thought as if it was a float in a parade passing by. Or, you could see it as a cloud passing by in the darkness of your mind. Whatever works for you.

The other thing to keep in mind is that you may have the urge to scratch and that’s fine too. Just do it. No need to torture yourself!

Step 3: Focus on Something

What you want to do is to focus on some sound in your room in order to assist your mind to remain quiet. One of the best sounds to focus on is a fan. If you have background music playing through your earbuds, turn the volume down enough so that you can hear the fan, in this example.

Why focus on the fan noise?

Because it’s not very interesting. You won’t be able to think a negative thought about it because it’s just a fan. You could focus on your breathing, but the only problem with that is that you may start to get too concerned if you’re breathing right. The point is that you want to focus on something that will not trigger any thought.

Step 4: Look for Signs

One of the really cool things about meditating is that usually, you will start to feel certain indications that it’s working.

One of the first things you will notice is that you may start to feel as if you can’t feel your arms. Don’t be alarmed! That’s a good sign. What it means is that you are connecting more and more with your inner-being, your higher self.

Now, here’s one of the hardest things for new meditators… When you start to feel your arms disappear, you may get excited! You may think, “Woo-hoo! It’s working!” But then guess what happens?

You’ll pull yourself right out of that deep meditative state of mind and come right back into your body. But that’s normal at first and to be expected. The trick is to go with the flow and be chill the entire time, but it takes a lot of practice.

The heading for this step is to look for signs, but a better word may be “notice the signs” because you may snap out of it if you purposely look for signs. Another sign is that you may start to feel really, really good. You may even start to feel a feeling of ecstasy, or euphoric, or just really, really good.

Do your best to keep the feeling going. The longer you can keep the feeling going, the better. The good news is that you can benefit tremendously from meditation even if don’t get into these blissful states of feeling. But with time and practice, it will get easier.

Step 5: Slowly Return

Once your timer goes off, don’t just jump up and start your day. Slowly open your eyes and take a little time to come back to the room. Relish the feeling! Bask in it. Milk it as much as you can…

Final Note

Meditation is a cumulative thing. The more you do it, the more benefit you get. If you’ve never done it before and it’s really hard for you to meditate for 20 minutes at a time, start with just 5 or 10 minutes. Break into it slowly if you want.

It takes about 20 to 30 days to develop a good habit for most people. So, try it for 30 days in a row and you should see amazing results.

And also, you don’t need to do it more than the one time in the morning, but you may want to do it twice a day – once in the morning, and once in the evening. When you do it in the evening too, you get the benefit of meditation into your evening and night.

Meditation is an amazing tool to quiet your mind, and to raise your vibration. When you start to see the benefit of it, you’ll be hooked and you won’t want to miss even one day!