Four Mindfulness Meditation for Health Benefits
- Breathing
The first thing is to start breathing. You can start it with breathing similar to breathing with yoga. Here, you breathe through the nose and mouth. As you do this, you inhale and exhale every 3 seconds. In long draws and long breaths, you will be able to fill the lungs with fresh oxygen and excrete all the co2.
But to be honest, You can use any type of breathing as long as it is slow, deliberate, and complete. For example, the guidance they give on the headspace app is simply to breathe so loudly that the person next to you can hear. Essentially, breathing slowly is the best way to point the body. When we are stressed to get more oxygen around our body, we breathe quickly, and when we relax we can breathe more slowly. Thus, breathing deeply and slowly will help us get out of a flight fight and instead enter a state of rest and digestion.It cures our heartbeat, reduces cortisol, and prepares us to enter a state of rest.
2. Senses
After this, you are often asked to focus on your physical senses. This means looking at the smell, noise, and even temperature in the room. Your eyes will close normally, so vision is out of this. The objective here is not to watch for sounds or to strain to hear them. Instead, pay attention only to sounds you don’t normally make. You may feel that you can knock on the house, maybe you can hear the neighbours, maybe you can hear the rain or the wind. This is always a great example of how little we normally pay attention and how rich our experience becomes when we practice meditation. This is a great way to get into that habit and give the body more rest.
3. Body Scan
Body scan meditation is sometimes described as its own thing, but it can be used as a part of any meditation session. The idea here is simply to become more aware of your body as we explained earlier but to do so systematically starts at the top of the head and then slowly moves through the toes. Seeing how you feel at each stage. If you want to use this process for sleeping, It can be a great tool for that purpose as well.
However, the best way to do this is to first strain and try to relax the muscles completely and then release each part of your body from it. What you will find is you carry a large amount of tension everywhere from your facial muscles to neck, arms, and legs. Once you recognize it and let it go, you will feel more relaxed and eventually it can enable you to get into a deep and restful sleep. For now, we are only scanning the body and using it to become more thoughtful towards ourselves and begin the process of introspection and self-directed meditation.
4. Focus on Breathing
After noticing each part of the body, return to the chest and pay special attention to the way it rises and falls. As you do this, you can also take the opportunity to recover your breath. Chances are when you first notice your own breathing so that your chest expands first. But really, it should be your stomach that moves first and then your chest.correct breathing should begin by allowing the stomach to relax and stretch and then fill the lungs, this process is effective.