If you have a regular meditation practice, you will gradually develop mindfulness skills. But if you want to speed up the process, to go deeper and wider, here are four methods we call accelerators:
…Continue reading Go deeper, wider, faster in your meditations
It is a classic joke that if you do not have time to meditate for twenty minutes, you should meditate for an hour. Admittedly, there’s a germ of truth there. But the joke is perhaps not so funny for an overworked single mom or nurse pressured by understaffing.
…Continue reading How Long Do You Need to Meditate? A Review of the Science
One of the biggest challenges with chronic pain is what we call pain catastrophizing. As the word implies, you experience the pain as a disaster, something terrible that will never end. Catastrophizing chronic pain has many negative consequences that can severely affect quality of life.
The good news is that catastrophizing can be turned into improved coping skills.
…Continue reading How to get out of catastrophizing chronic pain
Many studies show that mindfulness works well to relieve anxiety. Even beginners with as little as one hour of meditation training can see noticeable improvement in their anxiety.
…Continue reading Meditation tools for anxiety
Micropleasures are small experiences of pleasure that last less than a minute. They are short meditations that explore, create and cultivate positive and pleasant thoughts and feelings in everyday life. Regular training in micropleasures helps us create a personal culture of satisfaction.
…Continue reading Micropleasures: Delicious small meditations
Do you find meditation difficult? Maybe it’s because you look at meditation as a winner’s game, when in fact, it’s a loser’s game.
What on earth do I mean by that?
…Continue reading Meditation is like tennis
Sleepiness during meditation is quite common. Even advanced practitioners have periods of drowsiness in their meditations. But sleepiness is not necessarily a problem, even if it does not go away. In fact, there are ways to use it to enhance the results of meditation.
Sleepiness in meditation has several elements. We will look at three important ones: physical, mental/emotional, and life circumstances.
…Continue reading Sleepy meditations﹘What to do
One way to understand meditation is that it is about creating a habit in our consciousness of constantly trying to be more aware.
For example, when we meditate and notice that we have been distracted, we are helping establish the habit of turning our attention back to the object or technique. We are also establishing the habit of equanimity by transforming distraction into its opposite, concentration.
…Continue reading How to get on the habit train
Many of us are not as good friends with ourselves as we could be. We may be overly self-critical, putting a lot of pressure on ourselves, bitterly regretting things we have done, being ashamed, or otherwise speaking negatively to ourselves. Or maybe we just notice that as we meditate we get annoyed and frustrated when we are distracted or lose concentration.
Fortunately, meditation is an exercise in learning to become better friends with ourselves. And, as a result of that, we also become better friends with those around us.
…Continue reading Kindness and meditation
Nurture Positive is the name we give to all the meditation techniques that involve the intentional cultivation of positive mental images, mental talk, and positive emotion. This category of techniques is perhaps the most colorful and diverse of any other category. In it, we find many different techniques such as song, prayer, mantra, calligraphy, icon paintings, feng shui, and many others.
…Continue reading Nurture positive: Create and cultivate positivity through mindfulness