Meditation

Meditation is a good daily practice to engage in. While it takes a bit of practice to get to a stage of just being in the moment it is worth it. Studies looking at the benefits of meditating suggest that it boosts immunity, gives emotional balance, increased fertility, relief of irritable bowel syndrome, lowers blood pressure, has an anti-inflammatory effect and gives calmness.

Meditation is quite easy to do. You don’t have on sit on the floor cross-legged or sit in any other pose. Just sit in a chair, legs uncrossed, close your eyes and breathe regularly. You can if you like pay attention to your breath. You can if you like count 1 as you breathe in and count 2 as you breathe out. Or you can count to 20 and then start again and continue. However you do it, just take a step back from your thoughts. When you realise you are thinking something, don’t follow it but say to yourself “There’s that thought again.”

You might like to visualise yourself in front of a blackboard and when you have a thought that thought comes up onto the blackboard. And then you scrub it out. The idea is to get to a state of just being in the present moment. Whenever thoughts come into your mind, just scrub them out and go back to being in the present moment. It is a bit hard at first but after awhile it is a lot easier. Sometimes it’s not easy to switch off from what is happening in your life. However, if you persevere then you will be rewarded.

Even if you start out with 10 minutes of meditating a day then you will make progress. I have been doing 10 minutes of meditating in the mornings since January this year and in June my blood pressure and pulse measurements were the lowest ever. So it works.

Work meditating into your daily routine. You will find out whether the morning or evening works best for you – or perhaps you’d like to do it at both times. Whatever works it doesn’t matter just as long as you do it.

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