Tips For Success: Improve Your Sleep Through Meditation

Meditation brings the soul into harmony. It brings your life into harmony with itself and all around it. When then is it difficult to believe that it would help your sleep.

Meditation is an excellent practice that can help you fall asleep faster and improve the quality of sleep. You may also find that meditation helps you feel more refreshed with fewer hours of slumber. The following practices will encourage better sleep and bring you more energy.

Practices to Do Anytime
1. Breathe deeply. Breathing fully from your abdomen gets more oxygen to your brain. You’ll have more energy all day long and feel more relaxed when night falls.

2. Scan your body. Get in the habit of paying attention to your body. When you notice an ache or pain, you can adjust your position or talk with your doctor so small discomforts are treated before they build up and interfere with your sleep.

3. Become more mindful. Focusing on the present moment will help to keep you calm and happy. Studies show that multitasking may erode your concentration and create stress that can contribute to insomnia.

4. Let go of judgments. Meditation also helps to develop a mind free from judgment. Learn to observe your thoughts and reduce negative self-talk.

5. Identify obstacles. If some thoughts recur as you meditate, they could be trying to tell you something. Those nagging resentments or fears may be issues you need to resolve so you can live and sleep better.

6. Try Yoga or Tai chi. Exercises like Yoga or Tai chi are especially helpful when you approach them as a mental discipline as well as a physical workout. These movements and poses encourage deep breathing, stress reduction and enhanced concentration.

7. Use meditation to complement sleep.

Five Great Tips to Success through Positive Mental Attitude

There are many characteristics that are shared among successful people. Hard work is an obvious one. Creativity is often another link between those who have been successful in their fields. The willingness to take risk is also involved. One often overlooked characteristic of people who achieve success is a positive mental attitude. The mind is a powerful tool, and it is capable of incredible things when pointed in the right direction. A positive mind is one that is capable of just about anything. Read the following five tips to discover the ways that you can reach success through a positive mental attitude.

- Focus. A negative mind is a distracted mind. People who frequently experience negative thinking patterns are often stressed about a variety of different things and their minds will jump from place to place at any time. This is the opposite of the way a productive – and successful mind operates. People who are thinking positively can remain focused on the task at hand because they are not concerning themselves with other problems. In the pursuit of success, focus is a big step in the right direction. Stay thinking positively to keep your focus at its best.

- Resilience. Every successful person has had their share of failures in the past. Rare is the success story that didn’t overcome adversity along the way. Because of this, positive thinking is a must for success in life. If you are thinking negatively on a regular basis, you are far more likely to simply give up when faced with challenges or obstacles. Being prepared to succeed means accepting that there will be setbacks, and you are willing to persevere through the tough times.

- Making Connections. Frequently successful people attain their position in part due to the connections they have with others in the community. In order to make those connections, it is helpful to be a positive thinking person

Read more

10 tips for mindful driving

Driving can be a very stressful activity, but it can also be a tremendous opportunity for developing mindfulness and metta (lovingkindness), and it can even become a kind of meditation practice in its own right.

Here are a few suggestions for ways that you can use driving as a meditation.

1. Switch off the radio and experience the silence. We often drive along while listening to the radio or to recordings on tape or CD. Just as an experiment, try seeing what it’s like to have the sound turned off. It might seem at first as if something is missing, but you’ll quickly learn that the silence gives you an opportunity to fill your awareness with other perceptions, some of which are more enriching. But before that, I’d just like to suggest that not listening to advertisements, the news, music, and opinion can leave you quieter, calmer, more focused, and happier than you otherwise would be.

2. The extra attention that’s freed up because you’re no longer listening to the radio is now available to notice other things. You can notice any tensions in your body, such as a knot of tension in the belly, or your hands gripping the steering well, or a clenched jaw. Notice these experiences, and let your body relax more. Notice how your experience changes and becomes more enjoyable as your muscles let go.

3. Slow down. As an experiment, try driving at or just below the speed limit. Most of us tend to want to push the speed limit, driving just a little faster than allowed. Driving just a fraction under the speed limit can take away a lot of tension. Shift over into the slower lane if necessary.

4. Notice your attitudes.

6 Mindfulness Meditation Tip

Meditation. It’s a word that scares the crap out of a lot of people. For something that is so harmless, many people would rather mop the floors or stand out in the freezing cold rain for twenty minutes rather than sit still, close their eyes and have nothing to do besides stare into the black space. I feel like this quite a bit, and I am a major advocate of meditation!

Has anyone seen or read Eat, Pray Love? You know the part where Liz Gilbert is in the Indian Ashram struggling to get into the zone while her mind wanders absolutely everywhere it shouldn’t. Well, that’s me. Three times a day. Seven days a week. I’m not sure what it is, but nothing brings more angst than the idea of doing absolutely nothing for 45 minutes. The thing that constantly brings me back to my meditation stool though is knowing just how darn good the practice is for me. That and the hope that one of these days I am going to get the hang of it.

Meditation is a major part of my personal healing journey, and for good reason. When I first started looking into natural healing methods I read a book called You Can Conquer Cancer by Ian Gawler. Ian’s story is amazing, but it’s also pretty long and complex so I’ll tell the short version. At 23, Ian was diagnosed with bone cancer in his right leg. He had his leg amputated at the hip but after a while the cancer returned in his body. It got pretty bad and at his lowest ebb he was given two weeks to live. Ian did absolutely everything he could to beat the disease – using both conventional and alternative treatments. He took on the diet, juicing, enemas and even flew to the Philippines to seek help from psychic surgeons. But the number one factor Ian credits to his survival is meditation. He meditated for five hours a day!

The method of meditation that worked for Ian and the one that I think is most useful in healing is called Mindfulness Meditation. Mindfulness simply means to be aware of what is happening in the present moment. Meditating in this manner, goes a little something like this …

1. Adjust your position so that it is symmetrical, upright and open, and a little uncomfortable (if you’re too comfy you could fall asleep).

2. Close your eyes and gently focus your attention on the space in front of them, between your eyebrows.

Read more

Explore the Health Benefits of Golf

Some people bill golf as the "lazy man's sport." Absent of running, catching, or throwing as is par for the course with many other popular sports, it's easy to see why it would be perceived in that way. But playing a round of golf can actually be very good exercise. So if you need any other excuse to hit the links, going with the health benefits of golf is something that can't be refuted.

One of the primary benefits of golf is the fact that if you forego the golf cart to travel from hole to hole, you're actually walking several miles around the course. Playing 18 holes of golf can involve traversing 3 to 5 miles. And as any avid golfer knows, most courses have a varied topography, meaning you could be climbing uphill and downhill, working several muscles in the process.

Walking is a low-impact cardiovascular activity that gets the heart pumping. Many doctors advise walking over jogging because it isn't jarring on the knees and feet. Walking is often an important part of a workout routine and can promote weight loss and a healthier heart. For golfers who do not have a caddy, carrying a bag full of clubs adds some resistance while walking.

Research has indicated that playing a round of golf has the same health benefits of a full 45-minute fitness class. It will burn fat and also improve your good cholesterol levels. Some estimates suggest that playing a round of golf and carrying your clubs can burn over 400 calories, while walking with a pull cart can burn over 300 calories.

Continue Reading

Benefits of Meditation: How to Start Your Own Practice

Mindfulness meditation has been practiced as part of the Buddhist philosophy to promote peace and reduce suffering. In the West, the benefits of meditation focus more on relaxation techniques and meditation's ability to ease physical pain, reduce stress, create a sense of well being and, for some people, further their spiritual development.

Types of Meditation

Beginners may find themselves confused by the variety of meditation techniques to choose from. If you're new to meditation, it may help to remember that there is no right or wrong way to meditate. No matter what philosophy provides the basis for a meditation technique, the overall objective is the same: to quiet the mind and silence the inner chatter we carry on with as we move through our days.

Meditation teaches us to quiet our minds in several ways:

• Breath awareness

• Focusing attention on a single thought, image or sound

• Repetition of a mantra

• Observing thought patterns

• Walking

Although you may be drawn to one type of meditation to start, you might discover over time that you're drawn to others. Again, there's no right and wrong: try a different form or combine elements from different forms of meditation that interest you. After some trial and error, you'll begin to get a sense of what does and doesn't work for you. 

Meditation Techniques 

Follow the breath. With eyes open or closed, start by bringing your attention to the breath as you naturally inhale and exhale. Focus on the inhalation as you breathe in, and the exhalation as you breathe out. Don't try to force, control or change the breath, just allow it to be. Eventually you can begin to pay attention to the space between the in breath and the out breath-the place where there is no breath. When thoughts arise-and they will-simply acknowledge their existence and gently bring your attention back to your inhalation and exhalation. Watch your breath in your mind's eye as you'd watch waves crash onto and recede from the beach.

Simply sit. 

Three Common Meditation Myths and How to Overcome Them

There are three common myths or misconceptions about meditation that can block us from realizing the power and benefit of practice. Yet, if we take a moment to expose them, we can easily figure out how to overcome them.

  

1. Meditation has to be Peaceful (Which Often Doesn’t Happen)

This is one of the biggest obstacles to meditation:the belief that meditation is about cultivating very peaceful state of mind. Sometimes when we meditate, we find our mind is jumping all over the place and we think this means we aren’t meditating and give up. While it is true that many meditators find that the mind becomes peaceful during meditation that is not the goal of the practice.

Sogyal Rinpoche sometimes says that the whole point of meditation is to become spacious. He often made the analogy of being like a great host who accommodates a difficult guest.  When throwing a dinner party, if one of our guests is in a bad mood and starts to act out, will threatening to kick them out of the party likely result in diffusing the situation? Instead, we might ask the guest if they need a special drink or an especially appetizing morsel from the kitchen. Perhaps we might even invite them to relax in a cozy chair while we bring them the finest libation and most succulent food we can offer. In other words a skillful host does not confront a difficult guest but finds a way to accommodate and create space.  In meditation we are not trying to rid ourselves of turbulent thoughts and emotions but to just to bear witness, giving them space to come and to go.

Meditation is about learning to be completely present and aware in the face of whatever thoughts, emotions, sights, smells or sounds arise.

Read More...