Life is stressful. Life is noisy. Our brains suffer from major information overload (at least mine does!). Stress does nasty things to our health, and particulary our heart health.

Meditation is a way to help your body achieve total relaxation. Meditation helps you get rid of all the “noisy” thoughts and images raging in your mind, while instilling in you a sense of peace and serenity.

While Meditation is looked upon as a spiritual practice, it also has many health benefits. First of all, we inhale oxygen deeply. This nourishes our body and exhaling helps us to release toxins stored in the body. Meditation techniques are also being taught to people with life threatening diseases to help them relax and cope. It is very relaxing and nurturing to meditate for 10 to 15 minutes each day. The calm that comes over ourselves during meditation carries over to our other daily activities.

Some of the health benefits of meditation are:

It lowers oxygen usage.

It lowers respiratory rates.

Increases the blood flow and slows down the heart rate.

Helps you to a deeper level of relaxation.

Lowers muscle tension and headaches.

Helps build self confidence.

Helps in post-op healing.

Helps the immune system.

Meditation has also been scientifically proven to fight stress and related disorders like high blood pressure, insomnia and various heart diseases.

Stress is a major factor in many diseases people suffer from nowadays. There is noone that cannot benefit from stress reduction. Meditation contributes greatly to stress reduction.

One of the meditation techniques is meditation by breathing. With this technique you become aware of how you are breathing consciously expel all negativity from you body and mind, while infusing yourself with positivity and calm.

Here is a sample breathing meditation. It’s called the 4-4-8 technique.

Getting Started
To get started with meditation you can do a few simple things.

Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed or distracted. Then make yourself comfortable, but not too comfortable. Take a few deep, slow breathes and relax your body. I like to start with my focusing on my feet, then calves, knees… working my way up to my head as I relax. You might need some time (few minutes or so) at first, but after a few times of practicing this, it will come much faster and easier.

Here is a deep breathing exercise you can try as you relax. This is good to do while sitting comfortably in a straight back chair with closed eyes.

First, Inhale deeply for a count of 4
Make sure you fill your lungs completely so you can see and feel your abdomen filling up.
Hold your breath for the count of 4 and then exhale for 8 counts. Get into your own rhythm - one that feels right for you. There is no wrong way to perform this meditation.
While inhaling it’s a good idea to visualize all the good, healthy, clean and pure qualities filling you up.
While you hold your breath try to imagine every cell in your body filling up with those good qualities. While exhaling imagine all negativity, pain, toxins, impatience, anger, illness leaving your body.
It’s good to do 3 sets of 12 repetitions of this exercise. Work your way up to 12 sets of 12 repetitions.

Try this exercise daily for a week and see if you don’t feel more calm and serene.

As you get into using meditation, you can move into other areas and use the meditation for things like weight loss, stopping negative habits like smoking and other areas of self improvement.икониikoni

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