5 Meditation Tips for Beginners

You've no doubt heard that meditation is good for you. However, for many
people descriptions of meditation aren't appealing, and it sounds like
just another thing you don't have time to do.

Here are five meditation tips for beginners that will help overcome the
problems of (1) lack of appeal, and (2) it seeming too daunting.

1. Start small with 3-5 minutes (or less).

Some great new data collected shows that most beginner meditators
started with 3-5 minutes. Even three minutes can feel like a darn long
time when you first start meditating, so you could even start smaller.
For example, paying attention to the sensations of taking 3 breaths.

You might be overthinking it.

2. Understand what meditation can do for you if you have issues with stress, anxiety, irritability, or overthinking.

Meditation is a great way to increase your resilience to stress. If you
have anxiety, it will help reduce your general tendency towards
physiological overarousal and calm your nervous system.

In our martial arts school the students who've found meditation the most
helpful have generally been people who are prone to rumination
(unwanted overthinking). This makes sense given that meditation is about
focusing your attention on something "experiential" (e.g., sensations
of breathing) and bringing your attention back to this focus when you
notice it has drifted to "evaluation" (e.g., "Am I breathing too fast?")
or to another topic (e.g., "I've got so much to do tomorrow.")

Meditation can help with irritability partly because it helps you learn
how to recognize you're having irritable thoughts before you've blurted
them out in ways that end up generating stress for you (e.g.. nitpicking
your partner in a way that causes a fight).

3.  Understand the principles of meditation.

Beginning meditators often think the goal of meditation is to get to the point that they can focus without becoming distracted.

A more useful goal is becoming aware of when your mind has drifted sooner.

Another useful goal for meditation beginners is being able to redirect
your attention back to your point of focus without criticizing yourself.

4. Do meditation your own way.

Since walking helps people concentrate and reduce distractibility, a
meditation that involves walking can be a great place to start.

Grand Master Edmund Ciarfella suggests a 10 minute walking meditation
involving 1 minute of paying attention to each of (1) the feeling of
your body walking, (2) the feeling of your breath, (3) the sensations of
air or wind on your skin, (4) what you can hear, and (5) what you can
see.

Follow this with 5 minutes of open awareness where you allow anything
you can observe/sense to rise up into your awareness. Don't go looking
for things to hear, see, feel etc. Just let whatever rises up into your
awareness to do that and be naturally replaced by something else
whenever that happens.

During the open awareness portion, if your attention drifts to past,
future or evaluative thoughts, briefly go back to one of the points of
focus to stabilize your attention.

You can adapt these instructions however you want. Make your practice
your own. You're in charge! For example, do a walking meditation in
which you focus on one of the above points of focus for 3 minutes and
then do 3 minutes of open awareness.

5. Reduce All-or-Nothing Thinking.

Realistically, there are only a small amount of people who will be
willing to meditate on a regular basis.  The good news is that martial
arts students are not among these people.  We are a unique group who
understands that self discipline is the key to success.  That being said
another approach is to do formal daily practice of meditation (such as
the walking meditation) for an initial period, and then start just
incorporating meditation into your day in informal ways.

Doing a sustained period of formal daily practice when you begin
meditation will (1) allow you to try different types of meditation, (2)
give you enough comfort and familiarity with meditation that you can
restart formal practice if you're going through a particular period of
stress or overthinking, and (3) develop the habit of meditation to come
up with your own ideas for informal meditation practices.

An interesting fact that beginner meditators who practiced for 11 days
were over 90% likely to continue to a 12th day. You can see the slope of
the line starts to get flatter around day 8. Sticking with meditation
practice at least this long is important. Doing a 21 or 30 day
meditation project is a great way to get started…it has now become a
habit!



For More information about meditation please contact

Grand Master Edmund Ciarfella (40 Years of Meditation Practice)

www.umacenters.com

umac50@optonline.net




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