Meditation for Beginners – Silencing the Mind

Mind chatter? Racing thoughts? Meditate starting in as little as five minutes today. 

Meditation lets you step away from the craziness inside your head (whether your are clinically crazy or not should be for a separate post : )

Simple tips to get started now, especially for a beginner.

Pick something that you want to focus on. Whether it is music, sports, fish (I focus on my gold fish tank), whatever it is, pick something that you will enjoy staying focused on. Pick a point on the wall, draw an x on the wall if you have to even, so you can keep your mind focus. Getting your mind to focus on one point is critical in learning successful meditation. Your mind is like hitting a bar of soap with a gun. It’s going to keep moving until you make it completely stationary.

Choose any spot in your house that you’d like to position yourself in. I am a firmly believer in facing the East (facing Mecca). Whether it is in the bathroom (again where I meditate because of total darkness in my apartment) or in your bed, just do not be laying down. It’s far too easy to fall asleep within minutes of beginning your meditation.

Laying down is like taking a flashlight and  pointing it into the sky. the beam of light goes everywhere. There is no concentrated focus.

This is why you are focusing on the x, preferably sitting in the Lotus position. It takes a little bit of practice because you are blocking everything else that is coming into your mind. That is the whole priority right now – it is ability to focus. It’s not really about the meditation itself. More so it is about learning how to focus on one thing at a time. Your mind will play tricks on you in the beginning.

Try dialing five telephone numbers at the same time. You can’t. You’re trying to get it down to one telephone number. This is just for starting out for beginners. It’s about getting down five numbers down to one. Usually people start better with focusing on one thing instead of five different things. Don’t try to focus on a hard concept when first starting out.

Go from 5 minutes to 10 minutes then to 15 minutes. Once you hit that you can experience quite a different feeling. Your mind literally takes off. Yo feel kind of funny, kind of light. You’ll know you are ready to get to the next level.

It can feel like it is 120 degrees outside and your body can feel cool. You’ll feel like you are light and just want to float away

Then you get into stage 2 of consciousness. Your physical body is sitting on the floor. Your mind is wandering off in space….literally.

How does negativity affect meditation

It affects everything, especially meditation. Let me give you an example.

You go to bake a cake, you put all the ingredients together and get them ready. You have the butter, the eggs, the cake mix, you have your recipe in front of you.  When you are making that cake, you all of a sudden leave out the eggs. You put the cake in the oven, hear the timer go off and pull the cake out. It is flat. You forgot to put the eggs in to help it rise.

Negativity is like leaving something out. It’s like leaving an ingredient out. You still get the cake, but you’re not going to get the raise. As far as negativity is concerned, it’ll just seep into your mind and will consume all of your time.

There are spirits out there that thrive on negativity. How can you attract the good things in your life if you are negative? You are only attracting more negativity and these spirits feed more on this.

It’s like going to an all you can eat buffet – you can get as much as you want. This is how negativity energy goes. When you are receptive, you breed more of it basically. If you walk into the buffet and they are out of your particular favorite item, you’re going to walk away and go to another restaurant. This is how negativity works.

If you do not allow negativity into your life, it’ll go bother someone else. I know that’s a very general and vague statement. It’s something to make you be aware of. We can’t always be positive, we are human, but you can help minimize it and maximize your meditation sessions.

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