Do you sometimes feel that there's so much stress built up in your body and you just don't know how to relax? If you're like most people, the answer is yes. In this article, we'd like to describe an advanced technique in mindfulness meditation, referred to as the body scan, which is a wonderful way to let go of that stress and truly relax.
The first thing we need to understand is that our bodies react to the stresses that we feel in our surroundings. If you pay attention to your body when you're in a stressful situation, you'll notice that certain things happen in your body. You might find that certain muscles tense up, that your heart begins to pound, or even that certain areas of your body become painful. Of course, each of us experiences this in different ways. But all of us, in one way or another, have reactions in our body to the stresses that we face. These reactions are completely normal and are simply part of the way a healthy body works. However, if we don't pay attention to our body, these reactions can become so ingrained that our body doesn't know how to let go of them. As a result, our bodies lose the ability to feel relaxed, and we end up feeling constantly stressed.
So what can we do to let go of the stress that has become trapped in our bodies and feel relaxed again? Here's where the body scan comes in. When you do the body scan, you're actually training your body to let go. Once you get good at it, you'll be able to bring your body to a state of deep relaxation in which you allow any built up stress to gently leave your body.
To begin the body scan, lie down in a quiet place. It's not recommended to do the body scan late at night, as you'll probably end up falling asleep as soon as you become slightly relaxed, which is not the goal of the body scan. Start by breathing deeply, allowing your body to begin to relax as you inhale and exhale. Then, when you feel your body beginning to relax, bring your attention to the toes of your left foot. As you inhale and exhale, allow the muscles in your toes to relax, and imagine that your breath is going in and out of your toes. (This takes some practice, but you'll get used to it.)
Gently move up to your left foot, once again allowing the muscles to relax, imagining as if your breath is going in and out of that area, cleansing it of tension. Continue up your left leg until you get to the pelvis. Once you reach the pelvis, move to the toes of your right foot and up your right leg. After you've completed the right leg, move to the abdomen and up to your torso, chest and shoulders. After the shoulders, move to the fingers of your left hand and up your left arm. Then move to the fingers of your right hand and up your right arm. After you've completed the right arm, move to your neck and then up through the muscles in your face and head.
Once you've completed the head, your whole body should be relaxed. For the final step, instead of concentrating on one area of your body, focus on your body as a whole and imagine as if the breath is going in and out of your body through an imaginary hole in the top of your head. At this point, it can feel as if your body is so relaxed that it's almost melted away.
Once you practice this technique, it should take about 45 minutes from beginning to end. You'll discover that it's a wonderful way to truly relax and allow your body to release the built up stress. In fact, you may never have known that your body could feel so relaxed. And the best news is that this feeling is always available to you. All it requires is the willingness to take 45 minutes of your time to truly experience your body. Once you try it, you'll agree that it's a great investment in your well-being!
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Mindful Walking – A Technique to Enhance Your Well-Being
We all know that walking is a great way to exercise your body and help keep it in shape. But did you know that, by integrating the techniques of mindfulness meditation, walking can become be a powerful tool for developing self awareness? Mindful walking helps you to be more in touch with yourself and improves the quality of your life.
Mindfulness meditation, a discipline that has been developed over many centuries by the Buddhist tradition in the Far East, can be described as the art of paying attention. The techniques of mindfulness meditation help your mind become more calm and focused, so that you’re able to be fully present in each moment. In this way, your life becomes vivid and fulfilling. Instead of feeling that your life is rushing by with no time for you to enjoy any of it, you’re able to experience joy and peace of mind through your everyday experiences.
So how do you apply this to walking? By simply learning to pay attention as you’re doing it. While that may sound simple, in reality it requires quite a bit of practice to train your mind to focus for any length of time. With the fast pace of today’s society, our minds are so used to jumping from one thing to the next that most of us have never had the experience of focusing our mind.
This is where mindful walking comes in. When you’re ready to try mindful walking, you first need to forget anything that you know about walking and approach it with a completely open mind. Otherwise, your mind isn’t fully paying attention – it’s partially focused on what you think you already know.
Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Stand up straight and just focus on being aware of your body. As you slowly lift your right leg to take a step, simply be aware of how it feels to make that motion. Notice your body shift your weight to your left foot and gently propel your right foot forward, and then carefully place it on the ground. Remember, you’re not trying to go anywhere – you’re just experiencing what it feels like to walk. As you gently place your right foot on the ground, pay attention to how it feels as your body now shifts your weight to your right foot and propels your left foot forward. Keep paying attention as you go through about five to ten steps. Once you try this exercise, you’ll realize that it’s a challenge to keep your attention focused. With some practice, however, you should be able to do mindful walking for longer periods.
Of course, you don’t normally walk like this. The point of mindful walking is to learn to pay attention. Generally, we don’t give any thought to walking – we just do it. Once you learn how to be mindful, however, you realize that walking is actually a highly choreographed sequence that you were never even aware of. By doing mindful walking on a regular basis, you train your mind to pay attention more. Eventually, you come to realize that there’s a lot of beauty in our everyday experiences – all you need to do to find it is pay attention. Being mindful makes your life more fulfilling and leads to greater peace of mind and well-being.
Mindfulness meditation, a discipline that has been developed over many centuries by the Buddhist tradition in the Far East, can be described as the art of paying attention. The techniques of mindfulness meditation help your mind become more calm and focused, so that you’re able to be fully present in each moment. In this way, your life becomes vivid and fulfilling. Instead of feeling that your life is rushing by with no time for you to enjoy any of it, you’re able to experience joy and peace of mind through your everyday experiences.
So how do you apply this to walking? By simply learning to pay attention as you’re doing it. While that may sound simple, in reality it requires quite a bit of practice to train your mind to focus for any length of time. With the fast pace of today’s society, our minds are so used to jumping from one thing to the next that most of us have never had the experience of focusing our mind.
This is where mindful walking comes in. When you’re ready to try mindful walking, you first need to forget anything that you know about walking and approach it with a completely open mind. Otherwise, your mind isn’t fully paying attention – it’s partially focused on what you think you already know.
Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Stand up straight and just focus on being aware of your body. As you slowly lift your right leg to take a step, simply be aware of how it feels to make that motion. Notice your body shift your weight to your left foot and gently propel your right foot forward, and then carefully place it on the ground. Remember, you’re not trying to go anywhere – you’re just experiencing what it feels like to walk. As you gently place your right foot on the ground, pay attention to how it feels as your body now shifts your weight to your right foot and propels your left foot forward. Keep paying attention as you go through about five to ten steps. Once you try this exercise, you’ll realize that it’s a challenge to keep your attention focused. With some practice, however, you should be able to do mindful walking for longer periods.
Of course, you don’t normally walk like this. The point of mindful walking is to learn to pay attention. Generally, we don’t give any thought to walking – we just do it. Once you learn how to be mindful, however, you realize that walking is actually a highly choreographed sequence that you were never even aware of. By doing mindful walking on a regular basis, you train your mind to pay attention more. Eventually, you come to realize that there’s a lot of beauty in our everyday experiences – all you need to do to find it is pay attention. Being mindful makes your life more fulfilling and leads to greater peace of mind and well-being.
Mindful Eating – Helping You Control Your Weight and Feel Great About It
Do you ever feel that your eating is out of control and that maintaining your optimal weight is a hopeless task? Have you tried all kinds of diets but can’t seem to keep the weight off? Mindful eating may be the key that will finally allow you to be in control of your weight.
Mindful eating is an application of the discipline of mindfulness meditation, which is based on the art of paying attention. By teaching us to systematically pay attention, mindfulness meditation allows us to be more in touch with our body. When we begin to apply the principles of mindfulness meditation to the experience of eating, we discover that our body can actually help us regulate our eating, if we just learn to listen to the messages it’s giving us.
Our body is designed with many different systems, each carrying out different tasks. Many of these systems contain feedback loops, which, assuming we’re basically in good health, allow our body to let us know how it’s doing, so we can take appropriate action to keep our body in balance.
In the case of eating, the feedback loop allows our body to let us know when we need to eat and when we’ve eaten enough. When our body needs nourishment, a signal is activated and we experience the feeling we call hunger. This feeling is our body’s way of letting us know that we need to eat. Once we’ve eaten enough to provide nourishment to our body, another signal is triggered, causing us to experience the feeling we call being full. This feeling is our body’s way of telling us that it’s had enough and we should stop eating. Through the signals of feeling hungry and feeling full, our body allows us to regulate our eating to make sure that we maintain an appropriate level of physical nourishment so that our body has enough energy to do all the things it needs to do.
Once we learn to be aware of our body’s signals, it’s much easier to eat the appropriate amount to maintain our optimal weight. The problem is that we’re often only vaguely aware of the feelings we experience during eating, so we can’t properly listen to the signals our body is giving us. Sometimes, when our body is signalling to us to stop eating, we keep on eating. At other times, we think we’re feeling hungry when in reality our body is giving us a completely different signal, such as feeling bored, stressed or nervous. As a result, we often end up eating much more than our body needs, which can lead to unwanted weight gain.
So how do we use mindful eating to take control of our eating? As an introduction, try the following experiment. Take a few raisins and hold them in your hand, imagining that you’re seeing a raisin for the very first time. Take one of the raisins and carefully look at it. Notice its color, texture and size, as well as any thoughts that may come up in your mind. Now bring it to your nose and gently sniff it, as if you have no idea what a raisin smells like. Slowly bring the raisin to your mouth, gently open your mouth and place the raisin inside. Begin to slowly chew the raisin, noticing how it feels as the raisin moves between your teeth and the taste envelops your mouth. Pay attention as you feel the impulse to swallow, and gently swallow. Now that you’ve finished eating the first raisin, you can repeat the steps with the second raisin, and so on with the third.
This little experiment shows you what it means to be aware of the experience of eating. Once you’ve tried it with a few raisins, you can gradually get used to being more aware of your body’s messages surrounding eating. For example, the next time you think you feel hungry, instead of immediately taking a snack, stop for a minute and pay attention to the feeling. Ask yourself if it’s really hunger, or perhaps it’s just boredom or stress. If it’s not hunger, then you can deal with the feeling in a different way, rather than eating. With time and practice, you’ll find that you can control your eating, rather than your eating controlling you. At that point, it’s much easier to maintain your ideal weight and feel great about it!
Mindful eating is an application of the discipline of mindfulness meditation, which is based on the art of paying attention. By teaching us to systematically pay attention, mindfulness meditation allows us to be more in touch with our body. When we begin to apply the principles of mindfulness meditation to the experience of eating, we discover that our body can actually help us regulate our eating, if we just learn to listen to the messages it’s giving us.
Our body is designed with many different systems, each carrying out different tasks. Many of these systems contain feedback loops, which, assuming we’re basically in good health, allow our body to let us know how it’s doing, so we can take appropriate action to keep our body in balance.
In the case of eating, the feedback loop allows our body to let us know when we need to eat and when we’ve eaten enough. When our body needs nourishment, a signal is activated and we experience the feeling we call hunger. This feeling is our body’s way of letting us know that we need to eat. Once we’ve eaten enough to provide nourishment to our body, another signal is triggered, causing us to experience the feeling we call being full. This feeling is our body’s way of telling us that it’s had enough and we should stop eating. Through the signals of feeling hungry and feeling full, our body allows us to regulate our eating to make sure that we maintain an appropriate level of physical nourishment so that our body has enough energy to do all the things it needs to do.
Once we learn to be aware of our body’s signals, it’s much easier to eat the appropriate amount to maintain our optimal weight. The problem is that we’re often only vaguely aware of the feelings we experience during eating, so we can’t properly listen to the signals our body is giving us. Sometimes, when our body is signalling to us to stop eating, we keep on eating. At other times, we think we’re feeling hungry when in reality our body is giving us a completely different signal, such as feeling bored, stressed or nervous. As a result, we often end up eating much more than our body needs, which can lead to unwanted weight gain.
So how do we use mindful eating to take control of our eating? As an introduction, try the following experiment. Take a few raisins and hold them in your hand, imagining that you’re seeing a raisin for the very first time. Take one of the raisins and carefully look at it. Notice its color, texture and size, as well as any thoughts that may come up in your mind. Now bring it to your nose and gently sniff it, as if you have no idea what a raisin smells like. Slowly bring the raisin to your mouth, gently open your mouth and place the raisin inside. Begin to slowly chew the raisin, noticing how it feels as the raisin moves between your teeth and the taste envelops your mouth. Pay attention as you feel the impulse to swallow, and gently swallow. Now that you’ve finished eating the first raisin, you can repeat the steps with the second raisin, and so on with the third.
This little experiment shows you what it means to be aware of the experience of eating. Once you’ve tried it with a few raisins, you can gradually get used to being more aware of your body’s messages surrounding eating. For example, the next time you think you feel hungry, instead of immediately taking a snack, stop for a minute and pay attention to the feeling. Ask yourself if it’s really hunger, or perhaps it’s just boredom or stress. If it’s not hunger, then you can deal with the feeling in a different way, rather than eating. With time and practice, you’ll find that you can control your eating, rather than your eating controlling you. At that point, it’s much easier to maintain your ideal weight and feel great about it!
Using Mindfulness Meditation to Improve the Quality of Your Life
Do you feel that your life is happening so quickly that you’re constantly running from task to task and you never have time to enjoy anything? If you’re like most people, the answer is yes. With the hectic pace of our society, many people find themselves seemingly trapped in an endless list of things to do, as if they’re on a never-ending treadmill. That can make it very difficult to find satisfaction in life. Even worse, it can eventually lead to emotional burnout, or even anxiety and depression.
So how can we learn to slow down and have more enjoyment in our lives? It has been demonstrated that the practice of mindfulness meditation can lead to a dramatic improvement in the quality of a person’s life. Mindfulness meditation is a discipline that has been developed over many centuries by the Buddhist tradition in the Far East. Over the last twenty years, people in the West have adapted these practices so that they can be used by anyone, regardless of their religious affiliation.
Mindfulness can be described as the art of paying attention. While this may sound simple, in reality it requires specific techniques to train your mind to do this. Once you start trying to pay attention, you’ll notice that your mind is hardly ever fully paying attention. Our minds tend to jump from thought to thought and from experience to experience, with the result that we’re not really fully present in any of them. The techniques of mindfulness meditation help our minds become more calm and focused, so that we’re able to be fully present in each moment.
There are many techniques to practice mindfulness meditation, ranging from the most basic to more advanced. In this article we’re going to describe the most fundamental technique, called sitting meditation. In this exercise, you simply sit and attempt to pay attention to your breathing. Choose a simple, straight-backed chair and assume a sitting posture. Inhale slowly through your nose, and as you do this try to focus your mind on just experiencing what it feels like to breathe. Now exhale slowly through your mouth, once again experiencing what it feels like to breathe. Repeat the breathing for several minutes, while attempting to keep your mind focused on your breathing.
While doing the sitting meditation, you will invariably find that your mind wanders away from paying attention to your breathing. This is completely normal. When this happens, and you become aware that your mind is no longer with your breathing, you simply become aware of what your mind is doing and then, gently but firmly, bring your attention back to your breathing. Don’t get frustrated if this happens many times. Each time your mind wanders, keep gently letting go of whatever your mind is doing, and come back to your breathing. In this way, you are training your mind to be able to pay full attention to the present moment, and also to let go without becoming frustrated. These skills form the foundation of the practice of mindfulness meditation.
With practice, you should eventually be able to do this exercise for 30 to 45 minutes at a time. As you become more proficient at it, you’ll find that these skills begin to positively impact your life, as you will feel more calm and fulfilled through your everyday experiences, which previously your mind was too busy to appreciate.
So how can we learn to slow down and have more enjoyment in our lives? It has been demonstrated that the practice of mindfulness meditation can lead to a dramatic improvement in the quality of a person’s life. Mindfulness meditation is a discipline that has been developed over many centuries by the Buddhist tradition in the Far East. Over the last twenty years, people in the West have adapted these practices so that they can be used by anyone, regardless of their religious affiliation.
Mindfulness can be described as the art of paying attention. While this may sound simple, in reality it requires specific techniques to train your mind to do this. Once you start trying to pay attention, you’ll notice that your mind is hardly ever fully paying attention. Our minds tend to jump from thought to thought and from experience to experience, with the result that we’re not really fully present in any of them. The techniques of mindfulness meditation help our minds become more calm and focused, so that we’re able to be fully present in each moment.
There are many techniques to practice mindfulness meditation, ranging from the most basic to more advanced. In this article we’re going to describe the most fundamental technique, called sitting meditation. In this exercise, you simply sit and attempt to pay attention to your breathing. Choose a simple, straight-backed chair and assume a sitting posture. Inhale slowly through your nose, and as you do this try to focus your mind on just experiencing what it feels like to breathe. Now exhale slowly through your mouth, once again experiencing what it feels like to breathe. Repeat the breathing for several minutes, while attempting to keep your mind focused on your breathing.
While doing the sitting meditation, you will invariably find that your mind wanders away from paying attention to your breathing. This is completely normal. When this happens, and you become aware that your mind is no longer with your breathing, you simply become aware of what your mind is doing and then, gently but firmly, bring your attention back to your breathing. Don’t get frustrated if this happens many times. Each time your mind wanders, keep gently letting go of whatever your mind is doing, and come back to your breathing. In this way, you are training your mind to be able to pay full attention to the present moment, and also to let go without becoming frustrated. These skills form the foundation of the practice of mindfulness meditation.
With practice, you should eventually be able to do this exercise for 30 to 45 minutes at a time. As you become more proficient at it, you’ll find that these skills begin to positively impact your life, as you will feel more calm and fulfilled through your everyday experiences, which previously your mind was too busy to appreciate.
Robert Winters
This is my blog. It has been created for all my interesting articles. I like to write about a variety of topics.
They range from mindfullness to investing and even to the home and family life. I hope you enjoy reading all about it.
They range from mindfullness to investing and even to the home and family life. I hope you enjoy reading all about it.
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