Which is best for you?
Many people looking for stress management techniques and a deeper level of inner peace are being recommended the practices of meditation and mindfulness. I personally have been asked by people who casually know me as a “holistic healer,” “Which direction should I go in, meditation or mindfulness?” The simple answer is both.
Meditation is the practice of training your mind into greater levels of stillness and clarity by focusing on a single aspect such as a particular thought pattern or mentally scanning your body or simply noticing your thoughts and learning to release them. IN the process you learn to notice your thoughts and detach yourself from them treating them as separate mental events that are not your deeper identity.
Mindfulness on the other hand is the practice of being present with your thoughts, a friend, an apple, the forest that you are strolling in or any event, person or object that your are experiencing in the moment. Learning to focus 100 percent of our attention to our experience brings great peace to us as one of its many wonderful benefits.
Lets give each of these modalities a quick test drive. Although a guided meditation by mp3 would be most effective what I will do here is simply give you instructions have you stop reading for a awhile and carry out the instructions as best you can. Always remember in meditation you can mess things up or break yourself by doing something wrong. You can only become more and more adept the more you show up for your self and practice.
So find a comfortable chair or sofa. Sir in an upright comfortable position. You can have your feet on the floor or up resting on the coach or ottoman. Before you close your eyes begin to take deep, slow controlled breaths. Notice your breathing and focus only on that. Begin to inhale and mentally count to three as you inhale then on your exhale count one, two, three. Now close your yes and simply continue this pattern for two or three minutes. There, did you close your eyes and continue the pattern, focusing only on you breathing and counting? If you are like most of us you did then thoughts began to creep in. That’s natural and expected. Soon you’ll begin to notice yourself noticing the thoughts and develop a deeper ability to differentiate your deeper inner being from the thoughts you generate as distractions. We’ll go into that in further detail in a future post. But there you have it meditation 101. If you participated in our quick little demonstration you passed with flying color!
Next, a quick little mindfulness exercise. Go into your kitchen and grab a piece of fresh fruit or vegetable. Sit in a comfortable position. Gently hold your piece of fruit in both hands and look at it as if you have never seen anything like it before. Notice its color and shape. Try and notice every little detail of its skin. Move it around in your hands and feel it. think only about how this thing looks and feels in your hands. Is it soft or hard ? Warm or cold. Smooth or is it filled with ridges, bumps and indentations? Now squeeze it. What does that feel like? If you dig your fingernail into its skin what happens, Does it release moisture. Smell it. What does it smell like? Try and describe the smell like you are describing it to someone who never smelled that fruit before. Now put it in your mouth and taste it. As it goes unto your tongue what does it taste like? What is the texture like. What happens to the texture as you begin to chew? Can you feel the fibers breaking down in your mouth as it blends with the saliva in your mouth? If you haven’t already, close your eyes as you continue to chew. Feel it traveling down your throat as you swallow.
Take some time and evaluate both experiences. the simple act of breathing in and out and focusing all of your attention on that act. Then the practice of centering all of your attention on a single object. Recognizing every aspect of that object with all of your senses. In both cases the experience draws you intently into the present moment. Anything that you’ve experienced in the past or any of your future concern simply no longer matter in this realm.
Of course in both cases if you are like many individuals thoughts creep in and take away your focus for a while but if you continue on they fade away and give way to your present moment experience. Like any skill the more you practice the better at it you will become.
The practices of Mindfulness and Meditation have become a part of the mainstream health industry with both Harvard and Johns Hopkins University conducting studies that reveal the positive benefits of both practice for the potential relief of stress, anxiety and in some cases depression.
So whether you are looking for a alternate way to simply relax into a deeper state of inner peace or you are challenged with finding another more organic way of dealing with anxiety, stress and a sense of overwhelm, great benefits can be found in either practice.
As you see perhaps the best benefit of both is its very easy to get started.
Visit our blog for more information, tips and techniques for managing your stress and growing deeper into a more consistent state of inner peace.
Feel free to use the videos below to guide you through both meditation and mindfulness exercises so that you can compare the two for yourself.
Namaste
Thank you this was very relaxing…