Unlock Your Mind: How to Use Meditation and Mindfulness

When I was first introduced to meditation, I rejected it because I felt I didn’t ‘need’ it. I didn’t feel stressed, I didn’t feel I needed guidance, and I had better things to do than sit still with my legs crossed.

I now practise meditation regularly to help me focus and better manage my mind and consider it to be the single best form of brain training there is.

What Is Meditation?

Despite the cloud of ambiguity surrounding meditation, it’s no more than a combination of two very familiar states:

PHYSICAL RELAXATION + FOCUSED ATTENTION

• You don’t need to sit in a particular way or wear certain clothes.
• It doesn’t have to be a spiritual practice, nor do you need to feel stressed to enjoy the benefits.
• Meditation and mindfulness are not exercises in ‘emptying your mind’ but are best understood as exercises in sustained focus and reduced attentional wandering.

We’ll look at both mindfulness and focused meditation, but first, let’s look at some of the benefits of practice.

The Benefits of Meditation

Physical Benefits

• It helps you improve your physical health and immune function.
• It’s been proven to lower your blood pressure.

Emotional Benefits

• It helps you regulate emotions and choose your responses.
• It reduces stress and anxiety.

Cognitive Benefits

• It helps you to sustain your focus and concentration.
• It has even been shown to increase cortical thickness, as meditation grows brain cells.

Mindfulness Technique

Mindfulness can be described as focusing your awareness on the present moment while calmly acknowledging and accepting your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations.

Mindfulness is sometimes referred to as “open monitoring.” It is an exercise in bringing your non-judgmental attention to the present moment.

Remaining undistracted, you acknowledge and accept whatever you notice. Modern life often locks us in a trance of automatic, habitual behaviour. Mindfulness helps us become more conscious of how we use our attention.

Mindfulness Exercise

To try this with audio guidance, follow this link!

1. Get comfortable in a chair, give yourself a moment to settle, and close your eyes.
2. Spend a few moments relaxing your body, ideally from your toes to the top of your head.
3. Become more aware of your physical state and your body.
4. Notice your breath and the rise and fall of your stomach.
5. Notice the floor beneath you and other physical sensations, like clothes on your skin.
6. Now notice all the sounds around you. Don’t try to tune them out; just notice them.
7. Notice how you feel. Don’t try to change anything; just calmly acknowledge and accept what you notice.
8. If your mind wanders, that’s fine. When you notice it’s wandered, bring your attention back to your body or your breath.
9. Try to do this exercise for five to ten minutes, or longer, then open your eyes.

Focused Meditation Technique

Focused meditation involves focusing your awareness on one thing, such as counting your breath or maintaining focus on a single mental activity.

This meditation practice feels physically similar to mindfulness, but you use your attention in a distinctly different way.

Focused meditation is an exercise in directing all of your attention to just one thing. In our culture of continual partial attention, focused meditation reminds us of the power of sustained focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else.

Focused Meditation Exercise

To try this with audio guidance, follow this link!

1. Get comfortable in a chair, give yourself a moment to settle, and close your eyes.
2. Spend a few moments relaxing your body, ideally from your toes to the top of your head.
3. Bring all your attention to your breath
4. Focus purely on the rise and fall of your chest or the air as it enters and leaves your body.
5. In your own time, start to count your breaths silently.
6. Count only as you exhale, from one all the way up to 21. When you get to 21, start again at one.
7. Continue to count, in cycles of 21. Maintain your focus on your breath.
8. If your mind wanders, that’s fine. Bring your attention back to your breath and the count.
9. Try to make it to at least one full cycle without losing count or focus.
10. When you want to finish, in your own time, open your eyes.

Patience Brings Rewards

Have a go, and don’t worry if you find these exercises difficult at first. These practices take time to master, but with patience, your rewards will be rich and plentiful.

Best of luck,
Phil

3-Point Review

1. Meditation is really no more than relaxation and focused attention.
2. Try mindfulness with this resource.
3. Try focused meditation with this.