Meditation For Wellbeing: A Health Storylines Challenge

So here I am with another Health Challenge! This week I challenge you to try meditation.

Meditation has a decent amount of health benefits including:

·      Reducing stress

·      Helping with anxiety

·      Lengthening attention span

·      Improving sleep

·      Helping to control pain

·      Can decrease blood pressure

(https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/12-benefits-of-meditation#section7)

Aim to meditate about one or two times a day if you can, and use the Health Storylines App to keep track of your progress. Use the Journal feature to keep track of how often you meditate and how you feel afterward. You can also set alarms to remind you to meditate if you forget.

I meditate at night because it helps me wind down so I can go to sleep. I have really bad insomnia so I’m happy that meditation along with my medicine can help me get to sleep. I also may do a quick 5 minutes of meditation after a session of yoga as well; it just depends on the day and how stressed I am.

I also use a Mala when I’m not doing guided meditations. A Mala is a string of 108 beads sometimes called Buddhist Prayer Beads. They’re used to count the number of times you say/think your mantra. This way you aren’t trying to keep track of how many times you’ve already recited your mantra. I think it allows you to relax farther into the meditative state.

You don't need a mantra to meditate but it also could be a starting point in meditation. It doesn't need to be anything fancy, it could be as simple as 'I am strong'. 

A lot of you may be new to meditating so I have a couple books you can read to get your feet wet so to speak.

The first book is The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo, it has little anecdotes for most situations and things to meditate on. When you read it, it makes you think and feel like you’re having a conversation with a friend. There’s a short passage for each day of the year, but you can skip around to what you feel is pertinent to you. You could also use the Journal to keep track of the progress you make through the book and how each small story makes you feel and why.

The second book is Budda’s Book of Meditation by Joseph Emet it has tips of how to meditate which I really like. He’s also a teacher so the tips and the stories go hand and hand and it’s a really good starting point as well.

I’m sure you can find plenty of guided meditation sessions on Youtube as well. But I still encourage you to download the Health Storylines app so you can keep track of how you feel, what you meditated on and any mental blocks you had.

Something I try to visualize if I’m trying to meditate to help with my pain is imagine I’m inhaling a warm healing light into my body and exhaling black fog which symbolizes my pain. This has been fairly effective for my pain along with my medication.

Another thing I try to visualize if I’m meditating outside is to imagine roots growing out from the bottoms of my feet, and that I’m sucking up positive energy from the Earth.

There are a million ways to meditate, it just takes some practice. So just figure out what works for you.

So in all:

·      Meditate one to two times a day

·      Journal about it in the Health Storylines app

·      Watch some meditation Youtube videos

·      Check meditation apps on the app store there are a good variety of them

·      Do your own research into meditation

·      And really just have fun with this

You can register for the app here and download it from the app store