Guided Meditation: Take a Moment to Breathe Today
Taking a moment to breathe is taking a moment for yourself. Guided meditation is the perfect place to start any journey into the world of mindfulness.
Guided meditation: take a moment to breathe today
Before you practice for the first time, it might seem like people are not doing a whole lot during meditation. Yet, this certainly doesn’t make it easy to do.
It is surprisingly challenging to relax and simply focus on your breath without finding your mind wandering off after the third inhalation or so. Give it a try now if you like!
With practice, though, we can train the mind to stop this running train of thoughts for a few minutes. During guided meditations we follow the lead of someone else. Not only does this make it easier to relax, it also exposes us to the techniques we need to develop our practice.
The benefits of meditation are profound, including reduced stress, improved sleep, and better quality of life. There are several different types of meditation, too. Mindfulness practices cover much more than breathing and can incorporate visualization, sound, or physical sensations.
Exploring these techniques through guided meditation is now easy to do anywhere you go with popular apps like Calm, Waking Up, Mindworks, and Headspace. These platforms typically offer courses that guide users through each meditation, helping them improve their technique incrementally. Slumber Yard also has a great guide to meditation, its benefits, and how it relates to sleep!
The benefits of meditation
When it comes to sleep, guided meditation offers a host of direct and indirect benefits. In many practices, meditation gives the mind a chance to rest and take a break from the thoughts and emotions that flood through it all day.
Disconnecting the mind from this reduces anxiety and even helps tackle things such as the racing mind, which often plague insomniacs.
Other techniques aim to directly induce sleep. Guided relaxation meditations take listeners through progressively letting go of their anxieties and releasing the tension from their muscles.
You can practice these meditations in a chair to relax or in bed with the goal of falling asleep. The soothing natural sounds in the background and calming mental images, cause many people to find it difficult to stay awake even if they want to!
There’s something for everyone in meditation and the heightened awareness it can help you take into your day. Try out one of the guided meditations below or, for a slightly different mindfulness practice, give our boxed breathing exercise a shot!