How to try Mindfulness Meditation

Yesterday I discussed Mindfulness meditation and the benefits it seems to have. Today as promised I'll tell you how it's done.

This technique of Mindfulness is based heavily on a page at About.com, as I'm as much of a newbie at this as any of you.

How to Try Mindfulness Meditation

1. Find a quiet and comfortable place. Sit in a chair or on the floor with your head, neck and back straight but not stiff. Karen of Psychology Today says you should 'imagine your spine is a tree and you are leaning against it.' So go ahead and imagine an oak tree growing out your back.
2. Try to put aside all thoughts of the past and the future and stay in the present. For example you probably don't want to keep thinking about the image of an oak tree where your spine should be.
3. Become aware of your breathing. Focus on the sensation of air moving in and out of your body as you breathe. Feel your belly rise and fall, the air enter your nostrils and leave your mouth. Pay attention to the way each breath changes and is different.
4. Watch every thought come and go, whether it be a worry, fear, anxiety or hope. When thoughts come up in your mind, don't ignore or suppress them but simply note them, remain calm and use your breathing as an anchor to draw you back to the present moment.
5. If you find yourself getting carried away in your thoughts, observe where your mind went off to, without judging, and simply return to your breathing. Remember not to be hard on yourself if this happens And if you do, don't be hard on yourself or being hard on yourself.
6. As the time comes to a close, sit for a minute or two, becoming aware of where you are. Get up carefully and slowly. After all, there's an oak tree where you're spine should be.

In short, there are no real tricks to mindfulness meditation. It's just about sitting back, and watching your thoughts fly past you. Concentrate on your breathing, and notice the thoughts as they go past, but try not to get caught up in them.

I'll be trying this for 15 minutes a day for the next seven days and we'll see if it has any effect.
Why not try it too? At best, you may help calm yourself down, be able to concentrate better, and give you a greater feeling of purpose. At worst you've sat down and relaxed for 15 minutes. At absolute worst, you'll open your eyes and discover that you are suddenly spouting acorns...

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How to be a Spiritual Atheist - Mindfulness Meditation

If you're anything like me, the word mediation probably conjures up the image of lots of orange cloaked Buddhists sitting a long room humming. That or some new age hippies sat in the lotus position with quaint smiles on their face breathing in marijuana incense. In short I see it as something mystical, quaint, and ridiculous.

That's probably because of my childhood. (What isn't?) When I was growing up, I was told that meditation was evil. An empty mind paved the way for Demons to come in and take over. And so instead, we would spend hours praying instead. Because somehow that was different. And so in my mind Meditation has strange powers. It connects with a spirit, with the occult, or with some other fictional illusion. And part of me still thinks of it that way. If meditation does require a belief in the supernatural then clearly it's not the kind of thing an Atheist would want to be involved in. But thankfully, as with most things, I've got that wrong.

Meditation is not mystical, or supernatural. At its most basic, meditation is about taking a step back, looking inside your mind, and just noticing what you find there. Mindfullness meditation, especially, is simply a technique in which one pays attention to his or her present emotions, thoughts and body sensations, such as breathing, without passing judgment or reacting. An individual simply releases his thoughts and “lets it go.”

I used to meditate this daily, back when I was in university and was flirting with the idea of New Age and I remember feeling better for it. Watching my thoughts for 10-20 minutes a day meant that I able to keep an eye on them all day. Often I would notice a thought running through my head and have time to think about it before reacting, as if there was a buffer between my thoughts and my mind.

To have that level of awareness can only be described as spiritual. To be able to see into your own thoughts, is to see yourself as you really are. But was that really due to the meditation? Or was that due to my belief in the New Age at the time

But that's just my experience. It doesn't count as science. However, scientific investigations into Mindfulness meditation have found that it can increase concentration, help decrease stress, increase the feeling of general control over your life and increase the feeling of life purpose.

All this just by sitting back and watching the world go by? It seems like something too good to not try!

Further experimentation is required. Therefore, for the next week, from Saturday onwards, I will spend at least 15 minutes a day in mindfulness meditation, and feedback as to what I have found. or if we just feel like we've sat around doing nothing.

I'll post an example of how to do mindfulness meditation tomorrow, and we can see how it goes?

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A Scientific Self-Help Guru

The world is ablaze with self help gurus right now. For just $19.95 I can show you how to get rid of them.

This is the problem with the self help industry. It has become, by and large, a massive money making machine. Nowadays anyone can become a self help guru. With the littlest of effort, anyone can begin to make money telling other people how to live their life.

It's a system that works brilliantly for the self help gurus. But, I'm increasingly beginning to realise. It doesn't work so well for the rest of us. For example I've been a fan of Dumb Little Man and Stepcase Lifehack for sometime, but increasingly find their articles to be unreliable. They have articles urging me to drink 8 glasses of water a day, or Feng shui my office. When they have that kind of information on them how can I believe anything they say?

How do you tell the good advice from the bad? How do you know what works and what doesn't? For someone like me, struggling to start their own journey to self-improvement, the choices are overwhelming.

And so I plan set about to separate the plausible from the ridiculous, the stupid from the successful, the rich-in-quality from the morally bankrupt.

I will be looking to review all the self help techniques I can and find the hard evidence. Do they really work? Or are they just ways of distracting yourself until you feel better? I want to make this blog the place to go to find life changing techniques that really work. From now I hope to not only find the spirit in a spiritless world, but track down the self-help success stories from the Snake oil Salesmen.

And then, when I have tracked them all down, and I know they all work, maybe then I can put them in book form, and sell them to people for $19.95 a go...

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