How To Use Meditation Techniques

Meditation is a form of sorting yourself out whether it's for your mind, whether it's for your body or whether it's for your soul. It actually clears cluttered minds, helps improve your physiology, makes you feel a lot more grounded, and it also reconnects you with yourself. People who have been meditating for a long time say that they feel a lot happier, healthier and peaceful.

It's a discipline that requires some time to see some change. It's a free method to actually help you with all sorts of health problems and there are a number of different techniques that you can use that make it acceptable for you. Find a technique that really resonates with you.

A very basic technique that you can use is breathing which is where you control your breathing a number of times a day, so 5 minutes in the morning, 5 minutes in the evening, and this allows increased oxygen to be circulated around your body and it allows toxins to actually be removed. So, there's a cleansing process that actually happens there. Walking your dog in the park in the morning is also a form of meditation, so if any of you have a pet dog, then link it with meditation and you'll actually see that you can kill two birds with one stone.

It really starts to reconnect you with nature which is one of the really powerful things about meditation. More advanced techniques include learning to meditate using a sound or a sound vibration. In the traditional Indian Ayurvedic text, we actually call this a mantra.

And here, you can actually go on a course where you're given a specific mantra, a specific sound which is suitable for you, and you're taught how to actually meditate on this sound. Once you learn how to meditate on this sound and it becomes comfortable for you, you resonate with it and it becomes part of your everyday life. When you actually meditate using a sound, it resonates with your mind, with your body, with your soul, and allows your body to discharge nervous tension at a very deep level.

So, sound vibrations are really effective form of meditation. Another technique used for meditation is something called visualization. Visualization is actually where you put your body into a very relaxed state whether this is at home, you find a space at home and you have a CD that you can follow, or you actually drop into a meditation class, and you have a teacher take you through visualization.

Visualizations are very powerful in the sense that they help your mind reconnect with something very positive and it's that positive feeling that emanates throughout your body and reduces nervous tension. A nice easy visualization is where you find yourself in a very relaxed state, close your eyes, you can be lying, sitting, whatever feels right to you, and then you actually start to focus on an element of nature, something that you have experienced in your past. This can be a holiday, a trek that you went on, something in nature that really inspired you.

A very powerful visualization is actually to take your self slowly back to this experience and to relive that experience reconnecting yourself with the power that you saw through this natural source and bring back all of those positive feelings to your mind, body and soul. So, visualizations present themselves as really positive experiences on the body and you can use visualizations in a number of different ways. If you're suffering from stress, you can use a visualization to actually start to reconnect you with a higher aspect of nature and this has been shown to be effective.

So, there are a number of things that you can do, breathing, mantra meditation, visualizations, walking in the park. Most forms of holistic exercise would be considered meditative disciplines, so swimming, cycling, and anything that reconnects you to nature is actually going to allow your body to really reduce nervous tension at a deep level and recharge at a core.