5 Ways To Indulge In Mindfulness Meditation | A GUIDE

“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness” (Jon Kabat-Zinn).The mindless ways we use to evaluate our senses, be it positive or negative, leads to our unhappiness. The direct effects of mindfulness on happiness is simply  to become aware of and consciously notice what is happening in the body and mind, accepting it without trying to change it.

Mindfulness meditation is a mental training technique that helps you to relax both your mind and body by slowing down passive thoughts, letting go of negativity, and focusing on the present moment. It is about cultivating an attitude of unconditional presence in the moment, which is thought to improve the conditions caused by suppressing and ignoring life's experience because it encourages the development of goodness and contentment.

Mindfulness is a type of meditation wherein you concentrate on becoming acutely aware of what you are sensing and feeling in the conscious mind, without explanation or reasoning. When meditation is combined with mindfulness practice, it becomes a psychological condition in which you are totally focused on "the present" in order to understand and accept your thoughts, emotions, feelings, and sensory experiences without judgment.

Mindfulness involves breathing techniques, cognitive restructuring, and other practices that help to calm down the physical and mental health and reduce stress and anxiety. Meditation can make you experience thoughts and emotions more peacefully and try to balance it out. Mindfulness Meditation can reap more benefits than trying to teach people to be positive. The overall evidence supports the effectiveness of meditation for various conditions, including Stress, Anxiety, Pain, Depression, Insomnia, High blood pressure (hypertension) can be reduced with the help of mindfulness exercises.

5 ways to indulge in mindfulness meditation:

1. Focus on your breathing: You should begin by focusing as you in-breath and out-breath. This is very simple yet, very effective to calm your mind and body. In breathing exercises, you need to concentrate and bring your mind at home. This will ease in the passage of your thoughts as well as your breathing patterns. It allows you to get more oxygen into your body and creates a space between the stimulus and your highly elevated stress response. Thereby, calms your emotions and feelings.
2. Awareness of your body and bodily sensations: The impact of the oneness of body and mind is enormous. In the real situations that’s rarely the case, our body is there but our mind is elsewhere and vice versa. Our mind may be caught in the past or in the future, in regrets, sorrow, fear, or uncertainty, and we are absented minded. So, meditating can help you to focus on the feeling of your palms on your knees or the sound of the surrounding environment to calm your mind and create awareness of your bodily sensation.
3. Take control of your thoughts and reduce tension: If you want to make it easier to flow your thoughts and emotions then you have to become truly aware of your body. When you notice there is some tension or stress, you can practice total relaxation, deep relaxation, in a sitting or lying position. There can be tension and pain have been building up for a long time, and our bodies are suffering as a result. Relaxation in a sitting or lying position with the help of mindfulness meditation release us from these disturbances and heal our mind.
4. Maintain a post-meditation journal: Writing down your thoughts in a journal in a bullet entry form can help you to keep a record on daily goals and improvements that you made to become more mindful. It could be as simple as making a list of the good things that have happened to you or writing down your true feelings with every detail. Don't evaluate yourself for whatever thoughts arise; instead, practice writing and recognizing your emotions.
5. Walking Meditation: You're there, with both body and mind. Walking meditation motivates you to be fully present by focusing on each footstep. Walking meditation does not require any effort because it is pleasing. This entails becoming conscious of each foot's movement; observing the action of moving, lowering, and lifting each foot sensing the ground sequentially.