By Raquel Issenberg
As multidimensional as wellness can be, meditation has become a favored “gadget” that serves most of its branches through the regulation of our nervous system, usually rattled by our busy lives and the world we live in.
With meditation, we can also connect with our purest intuition, the non-logical inner knowledge that provides us with priceless insights into better decisions, infuses new energy into our thoughts, helps us burst our creativity through higher discernment, and awakens the joy within.
There is also a genuine appeal in helping ourselves, our families, and our community by being steady and calm enough to engage and create change.
Most of us on this path might have wondered which meditation is best, and maybe even pushed ourselves into a style or a “specific” sit-up time that wasn’t adequate, and probably never felt fully connected and eventually dropped it. I have been there several times.
We are continuously changing, and our self-discoveries as well. Fortunately, there are many, many ways to bring the mind into silence. I imply “silence” as muted thoughts that stay behind if we shift our awareness from them. According to studies, we have 60-80,000 thoughts per day.
The good news is that you can certainly start with 1-3 minutes of daily breath-awareness and build up from there into meditation. And if you skip a day or more, try to slip in kind words for yourself, too, because there’s no “meditation police” :)
Here are the most practiced meditation styles:
Mantra:
A mantra is a tool that functions as an anchor for the mind. The mind always wants to “have a job” and to solve things to feel better. The reality is that, with all the stimuli from our lives, our thoughts usually become disorganized and frequently chaotic. If we give our mind an actual job, like focusing on a mantra, our thoughts will start to stay behind. And every time a rattling thought “grabs the microphone”, we gently “turn the mic off” by just coming back to our mantra. That’s how it works. By relaxing our minds during and after meditation, we start to widen out the space in between thoughts where our joy and intuition lodge in.
Mindfulness:
Mindfulness meditation has its roots in Vipassana, the “meditation of the Buddha”. Both are correlated but show considerable differences. In common Mindfulness practices, you purposely use your mind to bring attention to the present moment with no judgment. Therefore, the mind is anchored with the help of the five senses, and the environment. Vipassana is an intense discipline that also aims for the present moment, but the practice asks the student for deeper insights into the relationship between themselves and the world, and how they react to it by not reacting to it.
Visualization:
Visualization is a remarkably vast definition within meditative disciplines, hence I will cover only the style I practice. In general, by picturing a specific image you can experience soothing effects for the mind. In traditional tantric meditation, the one I study and like to share, you can tape into your energy currents by using the mind as the manager of your life force (prana). In this category, the most common techniques you might have seen or practiced are chakra-oriented. But truthful awareness of the chakras is not as simple as it sounds. We can start by practicing visualizations through meditations by using simple cognitions to help us connect first with our reality, like noticing parts of our physical body, places, colors, and even emotions, before moving into pranic awareness. We must first develop body awareness with a strong foundation of breath and movement, to easily glide into subtler concepts, like our energy centers.
I invite you to go deeper into the rabbit hole because there’s a generous field out there that offers different meditation techniques to choose from, and maybe one can work for you.
My final suggestion: once you have found a meditation that suits you best, stick to it. Focusing on a style of practice will take you into deeper self-awareness and greater benefits.
Learn more about my ☉ meditation classes, experiences, and gatherings ☉
Vast as all possibilities
“Meditation is choosing not to engage in the drama of the mind but elevating the mind to its highest potential.”— Amit Ray
