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In order to start practicing meditation or any other practices, first of all you need to allocate time for this. If your lifestyle doesn't set aside time for a specific action, then you won't do it accordingly.
Answer your questions:
Why do I want to practice meditation?
Do I really need this?
How exactly will this improve my quality of life?
If so, when exactly do I want to do it, in the morning or in the evening?
How much time will I devote to this, regularity?
And then just take the first step and that's all.
You can start with a simple one. Sit down either in a sevenfold pose (Google it), or just on a chair. Straighten the spine, put your hands on your knees or fold them at the stomach. The simplest (in my opinion) is breathing meditation. On each inhale, you say “Inhale”, on each exhale- “Exhale”. Choose a comfortable breathing interval and do only what you say together with the breath “Inhale-Exhale” (occupy your brain only by observing the breath, do not think about anything else). You can also say it to yourself. There is also an object – free meditation called shine. Just sit there and watch your thoughts. Don't go along with them, just follow them. There are so many types of meditation. The main thing is to meditate a little, but often. For example, for 3-5 minutes, but 5-7 times a day. I suggest you read Mingyur Rinpoche's books. For example, “The Buddha and the Brain”. Good luck!
Download the Headspace app if you understand English by ear. The application contains a free seven-day meditation program for beginners, without any esoteric garbage, which is full of books about meditation and websites. If desired, you can buy other programs to improve sleep, for example.
Headspace is really a great app for getting started learning meditation. The authors chose a very simple and applied method. And we added all sorts of modern gamification features that really help to get involved in the process.
But if you're not friends with English , the app won't work. Read the book “Meditation and mindfulness: 10 minutes a day to get your thoughts in order” by Eddie Paddicombe (this is just the author of the Headspace service). In the book, everything is also simply sorted out, but already in Russian.
More importantly, the book covers not only static meditation techniques (sit and sit), but also meditation in action. For example, while eating or walking. This increases the level of awareness and engagement in the process. When you calm down the flow of thoughts, and “turn off” the automatic mode, you can really feel the taste of food, see the familiar street in a completely different way, enjoy a walk…
Meditation is officially recommended by the UK Ministry of Health. A positive effect on the body is proven by research: there are purely physiological advantages (reduced blood pressure, relief for those with chronic pain, increased productivity at work), and psychological ” buns “(immediately reduces the level of stress, makes a person more psychologically stable).
As for the latest literature, I can recommend the little-known German psychologist Kop-Wichmann. He has a course “How to become calmer in 3 weeks” – teaches you to meditate, and (just as importantly) get rid of bad psychological habits. You can start learning about its method from here: polezner.ru
Indeed, there are a lot of meditation techniques, and they depend on the task, purpose of the practice, tradition, etc. However, at the heart of any successful meditation practice is one principle-the ability to manage our attention. At a minimum, we need three skills for such attention management:
We need to be able to direct our attention to the object of meditation (even if it is breathing or other bodily sensations, external sounds or internal thoughts-all this can be the object of meditation). Guide and hold it there for a while (to understand what is actually happening there). This is a concentration skill.
We need to be able to distinguish what happens to an object, how it changes, where it is located, and what it does. This is a skill of perceptual clarity, or sensory clarity.
We need to be able to recognize that we usually treat all these objects somehow, or trying to hold them (I want more of these delicious French rolls, although I'm already full), or getting involved in them (we can't get rid of an unpleasant disturbing thought, and we continue to wind up and wind up), or suppressing them (all signals that it's time to go to bed, but I persistently continue to push them, and I continue to watch the next episode of Game of Thrones, although I know that this will not be able to get enough sleep). Well, etc.
To prevent this from happening, we need to be able to clearly and calmly perceive everything that happens in our experience inside and out, without clinging, holding, or rejecting. This is the skill of equanimity.
Technically speaking, any mindfulness meditation develops these basic skills.
Now, what are the benefits of meditation? Meditation is like going to the gym. The benefit of the bench press is that it develops our strength and body tone, we feel good. The bench press itself is not particularly valuable (unless you are a professional who cares about numbers).
Like this example, meditation is necessary to make us feel good in life, and to be attentive, aware and adequate. Meditation itself is not an end in itself.
I wrote a long article about the possible goals of the practice in the magazine “Live interesting”: interesno.co
If you single out one important effect (goal), it is emotional self-regulation: the ability to experience complex emotions more easily, not go to extremes, and maintain adequacy; the ability to feel more, but less “stick” in negative states; the ability to experience positive states and emotions much more vividly; the ability to find a resource for peace and clarity in any situation.
Which technique is most suitable for beginners?
Set the timer for 10-15 minutes, sit straight and straight on a chair, and during all this time direct your attention to the physical sensations of breathing. If the attention goes into thoughts/images/emotions (and this will happen), then just as soon as you notice it, return it back to the breath. If it turns out to be too difficult to observe the breath and not “fly away”, then use either marking (in another comment they wrote an option, say “inhale” to yourself on the inhale and “exhale” on the exhale), or counting: after each exhale, count: “one”, “two”… and so on to 10, then again from 1. If you get lost and “fly away”, you also return to 1.
Also try to return to the sensations of your breath (and body in general) more often throughout the day.
If you can maintain this daily practice for 30 days, you will see results.
Another universal entrance to meditation is through the practice of rest and concentration, not only on the breath, but also on other sensations and sensory channels: victorshiryaev.org
With these techniques, you can start meditating very well and successfully.
Finally, here are two simple meditation practice guides from the take-and-do series, one for me and one for my teacher:
https://yadi.sk/i/0Mmn7O9afETsA
http://victorshiryaev.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/See-Hear-Feel-Handout_RUS.pdf
I hope my answer will give you a high-quality “entry point” to start practicing. If there is a link to my fb in your profile, please write to me and I will respond.
You just sit down on the floor, put everything out of your head, and off you go! The condition is cool. And the benefits?.. I once had a terrible headache from meditation.
I was helped to understand the essence of meditation by understanding what it can give me on a daily level – here is from this article about the founder of Mindvalley Cherry Lakyani. Apparently, due to the fact that he is a businessman, and he has a very unclouded approach, he explains quite clearly that meditation literally helps to feel better not only yourself, but also the people around you, what they need from you. And this automatically increases the ability to feel a person, understand their needs and give them to them.�
Well, it's already easier to start from this – and even sitting in silence for five minutes is already useful)
To the previous full answers about the benefits of meditation, I would like to add a story from my own experience.
Previously, as written in one of the answers, I started with 3-5 minutes of meditation after yoga in shavasana (corpse pose, lying on my back). And nothing happened, it was not clear how to really relax the body in a couple of minutes. So I stopped practicing meditation.
And more recently, I read more about it and found advice that you should start just with a long meditation – 30-40 minutes. And one of the techniques is what is called a “lucid dream” in public places in the VK. The bottom line is that you lie on your back for half an hour without moving, drop thoughts, and concentrate without tension on your breath, or the ticking of the clock, or the noise outside the window. The main thing is to relax the body and not move, and also not to scold yourself for the thoughts that arise, but gently return to concentration. After about thirty minutes, you will no longer feel anything but a breathing belly. Very cool feeling. The next time this state is reached much faster, it becomes easier for you to concentrate.
Roughly speaking, it's like a car ride – you can ride on the playground for a year, but until you pass through the city , you won't understand. Therefore, entering the meditation for 5 minutes seemed to me less effective than immediately taking half an hour.
Namaste 🙂
In the beginning, I will write in the spirit of my favorite Catholicism: the easiest and at the same time the most difficult thing is to meditate when you pray. Prayer is meditation. And the more prayers a person says at one time, the deeper they will enter into a state of meditation. There is another option that does not accept Christianity, BUT even this meditation helped me at the time. Write in the web search engine: Lotus Flower Meditation. There are many different links. I think you'll find what you need.
It's not easy to get started. I tried it in my youth and it didn't work out. Then I tried it later,but I was taught and it worked. As it turned out, I just didn't understand what I was doing and read bullshit in my youth. The essence of meditation is to focus on one thing and distract yourself from everything else. Your attention is constantly focused on a variety of tensions, so you need to disconnect it from them. On my site ezopro.ru there are several articles in the “Where to start” section. There are no ads on the site and I'm only running it to collect things that really work, and not “spiritual masturbation”. As it turned out, there are very few of these working things that you need to do, so there is nothing to fill out the site with. You can read the articles “where to go” and “key moment” from there, and there is also a “way out of the impasse”. Everything is described there that is necessary.
In fact, you often do meditations when you're walking in the park, when you're driving aimlessly, or at other times. The essence of the process is simple – focus on one thing and then learn how to manage it. It is important to note that concentration is not tension. It was my mistake in my youth. You need to focus on something and take everything else more and more with it. As if expanding your perception from the central point in all directions, and not just collapsing it into a point. This can be done all the time, without poses, exercises, or anything like that, but exercise makes it easier. That's all.