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If you want to learn to meditate effortlessly and systematically, you are at the right place!
As this is a very multifaceted topic, the learn of meditation can seem complex. However, in reality, it is playful and easy.
It is exactly this inspiration and lightness that I would like to share with you in this guide.
Table of Contents:
1. What Are Meditations?
2. Do You Also Have “No” Time for Meditation?
3. Why to Meditate: The 9 Greatest Benefits of Meditation
4. Learning Meditation: In 5 Effortless Phases
– Phase 1: Intension, Motive and Expectations
– Phase 2: Location & Time
– Phase 3: Sitting Position, Posture & Body Relaxation
– Phase 4: Thoughts, Emotions & Feelings
– Phase 5: Grounding & Pausing
5. 3 Critical Mistakes in Meditation That You Should Avoid
6. 7 Frequently Asked Questions While Meditating
– I Can’t Stop My Thoughts, What Should I Do?
– What Is the Best Time to Meditate?
– How Long and How Often Should I Meditate?
– What Else Can Meditation Be Used For?
– Is It Possible to Meditate During Illness?
– How Do I Get Rid of Negative Thoughts?
– Should I Close My Eyes or Leave Them Open?
7. The Start in Your Meditation Practice
1. What Are Meditations?
Meditations are a means of observing and accepting thoughts, feelings and sensations thereby achieving deep relaxed states so that body, mind and soul are in balance.
One of the basic ideas is to have clarity in our present world by observing our true nature. This presence includes all incoming and outgoing daily thoughts.
Is the point therefore to have no thoughts?
No, it’s not about stopping the spirit and not having thoughts, it’s about observing the spirit and accepting the thoughts, letting them come and go. This makes us more self-confident; we love ourselves and are at peace with ourselves.
This is also about getting clarity and understanding in our thought world, which means being more physically and emotionally stable.
Meditation has been proven to increase our patience, joy, peace and freedom over the mind, which benefits us in every aspect of our daily lives.
2. Do You Have “No” Time for Meditation?
Does the excuse “I have no time for meditation” work?
There are many types of meditations.
These begin with a few conscious breaths and go all the way to guided meditations of a few minutes to several hours.
If an active meditation starts with just a few conscious breaths and we inhale and exhale tens of thousands of times a day anyway, the “I don’t have time for meditations” is an excuse for not wanting to deal with yourself.
So be courageous and start small. It is definitely not necessary to immediately learn how to meditate actively for 1-2 hours a day.
It is better to start with 5-10 minutes after waking up and before falling asleep and take 1-2 phases in the middle of your everyday life when you feel stressful. Place a few conscious breaths there for yourself, without great expectations of yourself, until you establish a firm habit. Do not force yourself to reach a certain number of minutes per day. Practice what feels natural.
In theory, that is all you need to know for meditation and the following sections of this article are individual improvements. How to meditate is something we find out for ourselves by actively learning how to meditate best.
3. Why to Meditate: The 9 Greatest Benefits of Meditation
1. Reduce Negative Stress More Quickly
One of the first observations that people make when regularly practicing meditation is that they are relieved of stress.
In today’s fast-paced world, meditations not only relieve stress on our physical body, which is often under stress all day long, but also on our emotions and thoughts. This is due to our holding and conscious pauses, which makes our cells more resistant to stress. As a result, we radiate true self-love, self-confidence and self-awareness.
2. You Are the Master of Your Thoughts
We all know the feeling when we go to bed in the evening after an overstrained working day and our thoughts automatically continue to run. Our thoughts just don’t switch off and in the morning of the next day, headaches with full of thoughts appear immediately.
We often ask ourselves the following: How long must I work today?
We also often make statements like: I don’t feel like working today.
If we are 100% honest and transparent with ourselves, we may realize that over 90% of the thoughts that rush into us every day do not lead us to a more joyful and relaxed life.
Most people today have no real communication and no understanding of their thoughts. For us, thoughts just come and go, and we feel that we can’t actively control the nature of our thoughts. Meditations are a wonderful means for the way we deal with our thoughts.
Through various types of meditation, we train new habit patterns that gradually connect our brain with the rest of our system, such as our solar plexus.
3. Your Mindfulness Increases in Everyday Life
If you have been meditating for a while, you will find that you are much more attentive in everyday life. Because you radiate less negative stress and your world of thoughts is lighter, you recognize and observe the world with new eyes. We enter a world of conscious meditation with full of mindfulness.
If we let this process to more mindfulness develop naturally, it is always effortless and loving.
4. Remain Calm in Hectic Situations
We live in a hectic digital world in which everything has to run fast. If you are familiar with meditation here, you will be able to stay calm and confident even in the most hectic everyday situations. Through your increased awareness, you will notice more and more often in these fast-paced moments how irrelevant this hectic pace really is. In these new moments you breathe in and out consciously and remain strengthened in your center.
5. Clarity in Everyday Life in Decision-Making
Meditations help you to release the pressure of having to make the right decision. The more actively and deeply you learn to meditate, the more consciously you approach your true being. The closer you are conscious of your true being, the easier you can make clear decisions in everyday life.
With serious decisions, which give your whole life a new direction, you may also realize that there is no right or wrong.
As long as you make the decision from your heart, your whole being will be in harmony with you and you will feel an inner peace and relaxation. Here, meditations support you from the inside out, from the heart into the world.
6. Activate Your Higher Consciousness
After you come closer to your inner truth through meditation and you radiate true self-love, a different kind of radiation slowly begins to spread from your core of being.
You become aware of connections that have been hidden from you until now and you realize why you are here on earth. The more relaxed and deeper you meditate, without a concrete goal, simply with the intention of getting to know yourself better, the more often a miracle occurs. Meditations are especially well suited to activate the access to the higher consciousness.
If meditations are difficult for you personally, it could be because that you still have too many beliefs activated, which shield you from your inner world. Here would be my approach to filter out the origin of these beliefs before I initiate deeper meditations.
If we still fight too much with ourselves, we quickly lose the desire for the beauty of meditation.
My tip: In this case, start with a few seconds at a time by actively observing your breath, instead of trying longer meditations.
7. Heart and Mind Work Efficiently Together
As soon as heart and mind work in symbiosis with each other, we get a different relationship to our mind. We deal gently with our mind and do not judge it further. True intelligence is the symbiosis of heart and mind. Meditations bring insights into how we unfold freely through pausing and patience.
Renunciations and limitations are often associated with impatience. Through meditation we learn a patient and loving approach.
8. Intuitive Impulses for Your Work Area
After the heart and mind cooperate lovingly, you will often receive intuitive impulses as to which procedures are appropriate for you today in the most diverse situations. Often this approach can even seem paradoxical and unusual to you. However, it is exactly those paradoxical and unusual wormholes that allow us to solve real challenges in our lives.
As soon as we have rooted meditation daily on an unconscious level in our everyday life, we automatically pause more often, and everything then seems simple to us.
9. Deeper Insights into Your Uniqueness
The meditation benefits here are less for the head and much more for the heart, which brings you closer to your true being.
Deeper insights into your uniqueness are able to turn your whole world view upside down. You suddenly understand on a deep level that a part of yourself has remained unconscious.
This was the case for me, after I realized that I had developed a genius for music, although I could never imagine composing my own pieces in my previous life, while I always loved music.
The starting point for me was to create my own guided meditations and certain humming sequences. There is still much to come, and I take my time patiently and continue to cultivate my unique ability.
Deeper insights are basically real breakthroughs for you, which inspire you deeply. These are insights that may only be meant for you, without being materialized by anyone outside of you. Likewise, all your cells could be excited to share these breakthroughs with the world and create true outer beauty.
During the following 5 effortless phases I will explore with you how you learn to meditate.
4. Learning Meditation: In 5 Effortless Phases
Different from many other approaches for learning meditations, I have thought about how I can inspire you in a different way in the form of 5 effortless phases.
This is my complete experience with over 5 years of intensive practice.
Phase 1: Intension, Motive and Expectation
The first step for meditation is preparation. There are two different types of preparation for meditation. One is for workshops or seminars that take place in a group and the other is meditation alone at home.
Always ask yourself the following:
– What is my motive for this meditation or workshop?
– Which intention do I have for this meditation?
– Do I unconsciously have a blocking expectation for this meditation?
If you have a clear motive, a pure and loving intention and no concrete expectations, you maximally increase the chance for deep meditation experiences that inspire and balance you.
In general, it is important to find and embody your own rhythm and to start with a simple and clear intention.
A clear and open-hearted intention is one of the great secrets for successful meditation.
Phase 2: Location & Time
Just before you enter into a meditation, choose a location that reflects your intention. Normally people do meditations in quiet places. However, you can freely use your imagination here.
Theoretically, you could even do meditations in a supermarket. You go there just to meditate, load your shopping cart up to the top, knowing that you won’t buy anything. You use all your time in the supermarket to meditate.
This could help you to stay calm in hectic environments.
It is also important that you choose the ideal time. Mornings to start the day in the best possible way or evenings to end the day are two popular times to learn meditation.
Choosing the ideal place and time for meditation is an underestimated art in itself that few people master.
Phase 3: Sitting Position, Posture & Body Relaxation
Sitting Position
Depending on the intention, everything is possible from sitting on a meditation pillow, on a comfortable chair, lying on the bed, standing in nature or walking.
The best-known position is sitting as shown in the picture.
Just make sure that you feel comfortable during the performance.
Posture
The most important posture often seems to be the straight back and spine, so that the energy inside can flow ideally. I agree with this almost 100%. However, there are also people who do not benefit from this. The reasons are as diverse as the universe itself. The most important thing is that you make yourself comfortable when you meditate. There is definitely no need to search for the perfect posture here.
Body Relaxation
At the beginning of a meditation, no matter if you guide yourself or join a guided meditation, there is usually a phase of body relaxation.
Here you let your body glide in peace. You could intuitively suggest to yourself how your shoulders relax, how your scalp, lips and eyes relax. Then your feet, lower legs and thighs relax. Finally, the stomach and the whole back will relax.
This alone is an intense meditative experience for most people. We don’t need expectations here either.
However, you will find that it is incredibly unfamiliar to us to be deeply relaxed in the middle of the day or throughout the day, compared with the time directly after waking up or directly before falling asleep. The sensation you have in those few seconds before sleeping and after waking up is like being half awake and half in your dream world. In this phase your body is still very relaxed, and you just start to feel the body again.
Most people simply think it is impossible to be in such a relaxation state, permanently.
Meditation is inevitable the death of our ego, because we let go of our physical body while meditating deeply.
Phase 4: Thoughts, Feelings & Emotions
After the body is relaxed in meditation, there is often the relaxation of thoughts, feelings and emotions. Here you can guide yourself how the thoughts come to you and how you let them go gently.
In this phase of meditation, different intentions often come into play. That is why it is so important to know the motive and the intention before practicing meditation.
Otherwise, you open an infinitely large wardrobe with clothes that you have never worn before and that you don’t remember anymore.
This makes the practice of the meditation a pure coincidence.
What probably happens most often is that at some point in meditation you fall asleep, because you have no intention of staying awake during the whole phase.
Through your habit you have created the self-evidence for yourself that from a certain degree of relaxation you will fall asleep and this happens without you being able to actively control it.
Within the 4th phase, guided meditations could also help you better understand your feelings and thoughts or let go of them.
At the end of meditations, there is usually a phase of awakening and coming back into the physical place. For example, you slowly move your fingers and the tips of your feet and breathe deeply into your lower belly and out again.
Here you are also encouraged to set intentions for the rest of your day.
In the 4th phase of meditation there are only the limits that we put on ourselves. I encourage you to think in possibilities.
Phase 5: Grounding & Pausing
After the meditation I allow myself a short period of rest in which I ground myself and I can simply be present without having to achieve or do anything.
But this is not always successful, especially during hectic days with many to-dos, I return directly to work after a meditation. Often meditations also help me to find the missing pieces of the puzzle that have blocked me and that have put me under pressure. Basically, this is how I make my biggest breakthroughs for my daily work.
So, if you are inspired after a meditation, initiate your inspirations into reality immediately so that they can be realized and manifested. This is the only times, I am skipping phase 5 after the meditation.
After the meditation is before the meditation
5. 3 Critical Mistakes in Meditation That You Should Avoid
Mistake #1: You Are Too Impatient
You want to move forward faster than the process allows. I discovered that this impatience is the biggest obstacle for meditations. Only those who meditate patiently will be able to let go of all thought processes and thus enjoy an optimal experience.
Mistake #2: You Have No Clear Intention
Having no clear intention opens an infinitely large wardrobe for you, you will no longer know why you are doing the meditation. I have gotten into the habit of always starting my meditation practice with a basic intention.
For me clear intentions could be physical relaxation, pausing and transforming. Physical relaxation helps me to relieve tensions that have built up in my body due to a stressful daily life. Pausing helps me to release and understand intellectual thinking. And transforming helps me to uncover the emotional beliefs in order to understand them more profoundly.
Another intention could be adventures, like out-of-body experiences or other explorations of the inner world. Often, I also combine the three different aspects, physical relaxation, pausing and transforming with each other in one meditation. As a beginner, I definitely recommend you focus on one simple sphere.
Mistake #3: Stop an Active Meditation in the Middle
Never stop an active meditation in the middle. This has become an absolute motto for me. I practiced some meditations where I had a greater transformation mentally and physically. However, I trusted my true nature, successfully completed the meditation and was quite proud and happy to have done it to the end. I see over and over again how people use very deep meditations recklessly or half-heartedly. This severely complicates your own process and you will never get to the depth you want.
I also have exceptions. Sometimes, I receive very important insights during a meditation, I then record them directly and thus interrupt the meditation. Otherwise, I could forget such spontaneous inspirations after the meditation, which leads to anger and frustration afterwards.
6. 7 Frequently Asked Questions While Meditating
#1: I Can’t Stop My Thoughts, What Should I Do?
As I have already mentioned at the beginning of the article, meditation is not about stopping thoughts, but about consciously perceiving them and letting them move on. The more we allow, accept and embrace our thoughts, the less thoughts that disturb us are present.
#2: What Is the Best Time to Meditate?
In the morning right after waking up or in the evening before going to sleep, you will probably find it the easiest time to get into the meditative depth, because you are either entering a sleeping phase in the evening or you are coming out of a sleeping phase in the morning. During pauses at work and in everyday life in general, meditation phases are always recommended, so that you are more aware of your thoughts, emotions, sensations and you are able to do an inner pause. However, meditations are super flexible and during the daytime, there are no limitations.
#3: How Long and How Often Should I Meditate?
This depends on your intention and can vary from a few seconds to a few hours. In the morning, it is recommended to do a shorter meditation and in the evening before going to sleep, it is recommended to do longer meditations. If you use meditations to help you fall asleep, they are usually longer. It is all a question of intention.
#4: What Else Can Meditation Be Used For?
Meditating for healing headaches, meditating for recovering from colds, meditating at work against stress, meditating for world peace, meditating for accepting negative thoughts, meditating for achieving emotional stability, meditating for grounding and physical stability, meditating for getting out-of-body experiences, to name a few.
#5: Is It Possible to Meditate During Illness?
My personal experiences suggest that meditation when we get cold or even fever leads to much faster recovery, if we are able to accept our fears in a meditative state in love. In addition, it is recommended to use healing frequencies during the meditation. These are additional aids or boosters for our recovery, but they do not replace a medical treatment from an expert at any time.
#6: How Do I Get Rid of Negative Thoughts?
By treating your negative thoughts with love and gentleness, they go away on their own. Basically, the thoughts do not belong to you personally either, but are part of the collective field. Here you simply attract the thoughts that resonate with you. If you stop resonating (personalizing / identifying) with these negative thoughts, the thoughts disappear by themselves.
#7: Should I Close My Eyes or Leave Them Open?
97% of the time we close our eyes in meditation to release more energy in ourselves.
Every day, from our five senses, the eyes consume the most energy, because we overload us with all kinds of visual impressions, especially since the digital age of screens.
However, open eyes are theoretically also possible, and this depends on your intention. For example, a walking/running meditation is done with open eyes.
7. The Start of Your Meditation Practice
Like everything in life, you can take your time and be patient while learning to meditate. How to meditate does not work with a “faster and more” approach, but with a “slower and less” approach.
So just start without expectations and with a simple intention. This intention can be the balance of a health issue, no matter it is from body, mind or soul – meditation will help you find balance with your inner heart.
I wish you much joy and success in learning to meditate.
If you can think of someone in your environment who would benefit from this “Learn Meditation” article, feel free to recommend the article to them.
With unconditional love,
Dominik
