This year, my goal has been to become more mindful in my actions, thoughts and presence. In order to achieve this, I’ve looked towards meditation.
Meditating, even for just five minutes a day, is proven to help reduce stress, improve sleep and a variety of other things. Meditation is the practice of consciousness and acknowledgement of the body and what is around it.
When one pictures meditating it’s a person sitting on the floor criss-cross applesauce and humming “ohm” over and over.
A lot of people can’t do that. I can’t do that.
I can’t shut off my mind long enough to get into a meditative state. It’s frustrating, not being able to be in the moment without thinking about everything else someone has going on in their lives. I can focus on the moment for about a minute and then my mind wanders to what I need to do later or tomorrow.
I have found a solution to this problem. Guided mediation, however, is a way that I’ve been able to focus long enough to meditate in the evenings.
A guided meditation is simply someone’s voice leading you through the process of being aware of your body and relaxing it. There’s usually music also playing in the background of some of the videos I’ve seen.
The guided meditation videos allow me to focus on something other than my thoughts because I still have that external stimuli to distract my brain from moving a million miles a minute. The first video I tried was about half an hour long and I was able to complete it without realizing that the 30 minutes were up or my mind wandering elsewhere.
Guided meditation videos can be found all over the internet. There are meditations for sleep, stress relief, chakra balancing, the list is endless. Length of meditation videos vary too. They can be as short as 10 or 15 minutes or longer than an hour.
After trying a few short and long meditation videos over the past few weeks I’ve found a few Youtube channels for meditation that I like; Jason Stephenson, TheHonestGuys and Michael Sealey. All these channels have different videos with various lengths that you can experiment with to find what works for you.
YouTuber Meghan Hughes also has a video about meditation, both guided and unguided that you can find here.