Many people think that meditation is a practice of controlling the mind and flow thoughts and focusing on the object of meditation. It’s true, but only knowing this without proper practicing won’t lead you anywhere.
Improvement in meditation comes from finding the right actions and implementing them into practice.
New meditators may get frustrated because they may not be familiar with the correct actions or steps for meditation. Many people may ask what to do during meditation? How to control your thoughts and find a deep meditative state? How to meditate properly?
In this article, we will discuss these topics and will figure out what to do while meditating.
So let’s dive in.
Here’s the list of 15 actionable tips that you can do while meditating:
- Sit comfortably with least body movement
- keep your eyes and ears closed
- Take a deep breath and focus on it
- Feel relax, calm, and tension free
- Set interval timers to bring mind back to the practice
- Pray and express gratitude
- Observe the body sensations
- Do body scan meditation
- Don’t fight with your mind
- Make distance from thoughts
- Don’t expect particular outcomes
- Choose a mantra and recite it
- Use mala
- Take a break (if needed)
- Be thankful
But wait, you need to understand these steps in-depth along with their benefits. Your reasoning faculty need to understand these practices with justifications and reasons before accepting them or dwell upon them.
I have been implementing these for a long while, and It is working very well for me, so why not you give them a try?
Sit comfortably with least body movement.
There is a deep connection between your body and mind. If your body is still, it influences your mind and makes it less chatty.
You may experience this mind-body relationship when you seek; your body is sick, leading to an unhealthy mind with negative thoughts and bad feelings.
You may experience the loss of everything when your body is not with you. These same fundamentals apply in meditation. Still body ≈ Still mind.
Having a steady position during meditation helps you to reduce the flow of thoughts and make the practice more effective.
I’m not saying that if your body is unmoving, your mind will stop producing thoughts, and you will reach to a deep meditative state. After long practice, it may be possible, but for now, as a beginner, a steady position leads to little control over your monkey mind.
Keep eyes closed and cover ears during the practice.
We want minimum distractions in meditation, so it is essential to disengage our senses while meditating.
Eyes and ears can easily distract our minds, so we should keep the eyes closed and cover the ears with headphones or hands-free during the practice. This habit helps your mind to engage in the objectives of meditation.
Take a deep breath and focus on it.
Slowly take some deep breaths. It would slow down the race of thoughts. Also, regulating the breathing rhythm influence the emotional state.
Researches explain that control breathing can calm your brain. Exactly how this happens is still under research. Controlled breathing may boost your immunity and energy of metabolism. Read this Forbes article to know more.
Feel relaxed and release the tension from your body
During exhaling your breath, Imagine that you are more relaxed and calm. Release the tension from the body feel yourself light. Keep aside your worries and stress, give value to this precious moment that it will never come back. Consider it could be the last chance for you to improve your well-being. This could be a powerful imagination to drive your mind towards peace.
Set interval timers to bring your mind back to practice
When you sit for silent meditation and can’t focus on the practice, this great tip works as a reminder and help to bring the mind back on track.
Set an interval timer every one or two minutes during the meditation to remind your mind to focus on the practice if it is wandered away. I use the insight timer app. it’s a perfect app for setting up interval times.
Pray and express gratitude
Doing prayer and feeling gratitude elevate your positive energy. It also creates a positive environment that is necessary for meditation. May some Negative energy be presents near you, so this practice will help to destroy it and makes the surrounding pure.
Related Post: Does Prayer Have The Same Benefits As Meditation?
Observe body sensations
When you feel any sensation, accept it and observe it objectively, don’t hate or crave for bad or pleasurable sensations, respectively.
For example, if you sense pain in the leg, don’t hate it; instead, know the nature of sensation. Realize it will vanish in a while.
Nothing is permanent in this world. Everything is temporary, so there is nothing to hate for and nothing to crave for. This is vipassana meditation to see the reality of the world without coloring specs.
Do body scan meditation
Move your attention from head to feet, again and again, feel the sensation in each body part. When you do so, you may feel the vibrations everywhere in the body because some changes are happening continuously in your body in a fraction of a second.
Don’t fight with your mind.
When your mind doesn’t listen to you and wander wildly Maybe, you start fighting. It often results in more turbulence and resistance in practice.
For better, concentrate your mind on meditation and don’t wrestle with it. When you realize that mind drifts away, bring it back on the practice without finding the reason why that happened.
Practice, patience, and persistence are the key to success.
Make distance from thoughts.
According to the National Science Foundation, an average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 80% are negative, and 95% are repetitive thoughts.
The majority of our time we are spending with thoughts in mind, sometimes consciously and most of the time unconsciously.
If you observe your routine activities, you will find that what you are doing isn’t the subject of the thinking process; your mind is always engaged somewhere but not in a present activity.
Unknowingly, May thoughts drive you from one place to another and disturbing the meditation practice. This could be a matter of frustration for beginners, but you must understand that you are a consciousness in which these thoughts are rise and disappear.
You are not your thoughts; your thoughts are like clouds in a big sky, so don’t indulge yourself with your thoughts. If they come, let them come and go. When a thought arises in your mind, just watch it objectively then soon, it will disappear.
This distancing yourself from thought practice may take time, but when you master this, thoughts won’t make you disappoint anymore. You will become emotionally strong and resilient.
Don’t expect particular outcomes.
When meditators experience something pleasant during their meditation, they tempt to experience it again, but they become upset when that doesn’t happen.
So, keep your desires or expectations away from meditation. They always ruin your meditation practice.
Rather stay patient and persistent in your meditation.
Choose mantra
Mantra meditation is an easy practice to start with. We know concentrating on the mantra is easier than controlling breathing, right?
Mantra meditation is the practice of repeating a secret phrase or god’s name loudly or silently. Contemplating on a mantra may energize your consciousness and influence your physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of life.
Choose a particular mantra from religious texts and meditate for 10-15 minutes a day.
Use mala
Mala is a string of 109 beads, including one guru bead. Use it during the mantra meditation helps to alleviate distractions.
Rest the mala on your index finger and circulate beads using the tip of the thumb. Complete one rotation (108 beads), but don’t cross a guru bead and move one bead only after completing one mantra.
Mala and mantra should be in a rhythm such a way that mind has two objects to rest upon. This practice reduces the wandering of mind and concentrates it on meditation.
May mala fall down during the practice, or you stop rotating, means your mind wanders away. When you realize this, bring it back into practice.
Take a break (if needed)
Sometimes in your early days, you may become tired or uncomfortable in between the meditation so that you can take a break for 1-2 minutes. It will rejuvenate mood and release body tension.
Don’t take too many breaks. Otherwise, it will become your habit to break in between your meditation practice every time you need a break.
Be thankful
While your practice is over, Be thankful for everything you have. Ask happiness for everyone in this world. It may fill you with joy and love.
Remember, whatever you feel for others, you will get it that same. So, express gratitude and compassion through prayer.
You were introduced to a list of 15 actionable tips that you can do while meditating. It works for other practitioners and as well as me.
Related Post: What to think about while meditating?
Start implementing these tips in your meditation practice. It may deepen your life experience and cultivate overall well-being.
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