3 Easy Meditations You Should Start With Right Now.

Don’t know what meditations to start with? I started with these 3.

I talk about meditation in the other article, Feeling that Meditation is Hard? Let Me Help You Ease it Out. I say there why I think meditation is good and how I learned to go through different types of meditation and the distinctions that I made between them.

I thought that following up with the meditations that I have started with might be helpful for some of you. These meditations are important because in time they became part of my way of living. Now I don’t see them as activities that stop me from what I am doing.

That being said these are the 3 meditations:

Body scanning for relaxation

This meditation is the one that I used to get myself into a relaxed state before learning. I read somewhere, I don’t remember where because this happened a long time ago 😁, that the capacity to assimilate knowledge greatly increases if you have a rested body. And in the article, the author described this meditation as a technique to relax your body. The meditation is as follows:

You sit on your back, in a relaxed position, with your chin close to your chest to let the back of the head ease out a bit. Your hands are on the sides of your body in a comfortable position. Your legs are a bit spread apart.

You start by doing 5 deep breaths. You breathe in slowly and deeply, keep the air inside for 1 second, and breath out slowly. Try to follow the motion of your chest while breathing.

After that, you focus your attention on portions of your body and you tell them to relax.

You start with your toes. Focus on them and you breathe in deeply and when you breathe out you say, not necessarily out loud, “relax”. You do this at least 5 times. At some point, you will feel your toes relaxing.

After that, you move up at your foot doing the same thing. Breath in, breath out and tell it to relax.

After you feel that area relaxed you move up to your calves, then your hamstring muscles.

When I am there I usually split into two parts. That is because it is hard for me to focus on the entire leg. So I focus on the front part of the leg, and then the backside of the leg.

After finishing with one leg you do the same with the other one.

At the end of this part, your legs would feel relaxed and heavy, like they would fall through the bed.

You then go up on your body and focus on your glutes, then your abdomen, and your lower back.

I find it a little hard when I get to the chest area because the muscles relax after I breathe out, but they need to contract again when I want to breathe in. In the second when they are relaxed is a very interesting feeling.

Continue, after that with the upper back, shoulders, arms, and neck.

When I get to the face it is also very interesting. I find myself having my face very tense during this meditation, probably from all the concentration. But when it starts to relax it feels like the face muscles press on the skull somehow. Super interesting 😅

After all this, I stay a bit in that state, continue to breathe deeply, and feel my body. Every bit of it is relaxed and heavy.

After some time this meditation becomes very easy. At this point, I can focus on my entire leg and feel it relaxing entirely. I also have moments when I am on the street, realize that I am stressed and to find my balance and take a step back, I do a very quick body scan to relax it, and I feel most of it relaxing almost instantaneously. It is also very neat to use it before other meditations as a relaxation part.

One other very nice moment I do this is before sleep. If I feel too agitated at night I do this meditation. When I do it for sleeping I go into detail on the body. I usually don’t get past the abdomen before falling asleep 😅.

Small breathing meditation

In the beginning, it is very hard to keep your mind still or to focus on a single aspect or event. The current society and dynamic is fast and everything requires attention and a piece of your time. We are constantly bombarded with distractions. The mind, sometimes, feels overwhelmed and needs breaks. We seek distractions and we run from boredom like it is Hell 😈. So when I tried to stay 30 minutes into meditation to calm my mind I lost it into the first minute or so. Got out of it totally disappointed and stopped after the first session.

Started back after a few years with another strategy, go up easy.

So the second meditation is this:

Set a timer for one minute. Yes, 1 Minute not more than 1 minute.

Sit in a comfortable position, no lotus position or strange forms like that. Being comfortable is extremely important. You don’t want your mind to be distracted by the pain of an uncomfortable position.

Close your eyes and focus on your breath. Feel your chest move with every breath. When your mind wanders, and you become aware of that, try to stir it back to the breath.

After the minute is done you stop. I recommend you use a smooth sound for the timer, I got out of deep meditation with a hard acute sound on the alarm and it was not cool, funny but not cool 😂😂.

The idea behind this meditation is repetition. Do this every day and increase the period by 30 seconds every week.

It’s like at the gym 💪. You go to the gym the first day, you do 1 full hour of intense cardio and weight and stuff like that. You are tired all day and the next day when you should have gone back all your muscles hurt. You don’t want to go back in that hell ever again. So on your first day, you go for 30 minutes of small exercises, work out a sweat but that is it. You might be able to do more, but you leave it for the next day when you do a little more again. Meditation is like going to the gym with your brain 🧠! Progressive load is key!

Go back to the present

I often find myself walking into a room and have no idea why I went there. Did I want to make the bed? Or get some clothes? Or maybe I wanted to call for the children? This happens when we are distracted. We do something now, but our minds are somewhere or “sometime” else. Thinking about what I will do when I will get to my mother’s, of what I did wrong in my code at work, or how I can improve my walking upstairs to get there faster ( yes, I think about stuff like that 😌 ).

Getting back in the present is an active meditation. It is based on being aware of where your mind is. That is hard and, in the beginning, I would set a reminder on the phone every 2–3 hours. Once you want to do it do the following:

• look around you. What do you see?
• touch something. What does it feel like? Is it cold or hot? Is it soft or hard?
• hear what is around. Identify the sounds.
• feel your body. Feel the clothes and how they touch your skin. Feel the surface that you are sitting on. Is it soft or hard? Are you standing?
• breath deeply while doing this.

The idea is that you engage all your senses and experience what happens around you.

This can last from a few seconds to 1–2 minutes. What it does is that it brings you back to the present, where you are, and it creates momentum for you to stay in the present.

These are the meditations that I started with. They were hard in the beginning but in time they became part of my life, part of my daily life. I scan my body constantly to reconnect myself with it. I consciously breathe and experience the world around me very often and live in the present a lot more.

Like sports, meditation is a way of living not just an exercise. When you are not afraid of a walk, or a bunch of stairs, or running with your children, that is when you are active. If you just go to the gym a few times but the rest of the time the only movement you do is to move from your office chair to the couch and then to your car seat, or to your bed, maybe to your toilet. That is not active.

Meditation is like that as well. It needs to be integrated with your day-to-day life. We don’t exercise meditation, we live meditation.

In the end, I live you with one of my favorite quotes from Uncle Iroh from “Avatar: The Last Airbender”

LIFE HAPPENS WHEREVER YOU ARE, WHETHER YOU MAKE IT OR NOT.

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