The Best Guided Meditations For Beginners
Category: Beginners Guide to Meditation | How to Meditate
Guided Meditation for Beginners: How to Meditate? (And Keep it Simple)
Guided meditation can be a good way to start if you’re a beginner. But when searching through apps, videos and downloads, there’s so many to choose from. We take a look at how guided meditations, and mindfulness meditation in particular, can help beginners learn.
Meditation is actually quite simple, but it’s difficult to do! When you’re brand new to the practice, it can be helpful to have a guide. The best guided meditations for beginners offer the perfect balance of instruction, reminders to stay focused, and empty, silent space in which to curiously and compassionately observe the movement of your mind. Over time, you’ll want to let go of the guide and try meditating on your own. The good news is, meditation is not about doing it perfectly, free from distractions. It’s about remembering your point of focus, and returning to it, again and again. Partnering guided meditations with time spent meditating on your own is a healthy, productive way in which to grow and expand your practice.
Mindfulness Meditation for Beginners
Mindfulness meditation is a very good place to start. With mindfulness, we teach the mind to remain stable and present, regardless of distractions that arise around us or within. Beginner mindfulness meditation often uses the breath as an anchor to which we tie our focus. When sitting in meditation, we simply observe our present-moment breathing with an attitude that’s free from judgment or self-criticism. Whenever we find our attention has drifted away from the breath, we kindly return to our anchor, the intended object of focus.
Listening to a guide helps provide structure for our practice. A guide can also help remind us beginners that breath meditation is what we came to do. Why start with mindfulness? For any type of meditation, it helps to have a relatively stable mind that’s capable of self-reflection. Both of these qualities are developed with mindfulness meditation.
As stability strengthens, we can practice shifting our attention to more complex points of focus, such as thoughts, emotions, or spiritual teachings and concepts.
Meditation Techniques for Beginners
Mindfulness of breath is not the only way to stabilize the mind. While breath is an excellent anchor because it’s always available, we might anchor the mind to a sound, a visual object, or even to the most subtle of sensations. Transcendental meditation, which uses repetition of a mantra to help practitioners remain present, utilizes sound and the vibration of speech to help hold the mind steady. Meditating with crystals uses an object as a meditation anchor. Guided chakra meditations encourage us to remain present with energy sensed within the body.
When learning to meditate, it’s not the object of your focus that’s most important, but the extent to which you’re practicing presence with your original intention. For example, if you set out to meditate on the breath but end up forgetting and chanting a mantra, you’ve become distracted!
Keep it Simple
When you’re trying something new, small moments of success are important. Experiencing the benefits of meditation can be our greatest motivator. That’s why simple mindfulness meditations go a long way for beginners. The Mindworks meditation progressive system makes learning meditation easy by starting with mindfulness of breath.
