I first looked into meditation as a way to cure periods of anxiety and depression. I soon found out that the benefits of meditation had far-reaching effects. Meditation improves the ability to gain control of thoughts, but it also helps to safely remove any emotional blocks that have been unknowingly put in place.
Emotional blocks are mostly created in childhood following some form of trauma or as a response to dealing with rejecting, critical or emotionally unhealthy caregivers. Repressing or shutting down emotions becomes a coping strategy to avoid painful feelings. However, this childhood coping strategy hinders adult relationships, a person who has stopped their ability to feel pain, has also stopped their ability to fully feel positive emotions like love and joy. They will be in a constant struggle to keep the emotions blocked, which can lead to uncontrollable emotional outbursts or turning to addictions, like alcohol or work as distractions. Meditations that focus on breathing, or body scans can be used to get fully into feeling the body, which allows emotions to be reconnected. At the same time using the techniques of disassociating thoughts from emotions, allows emotions to be regulated or experienced without reactivity. Scientific studies have also demonstrated the following benefits to mediation:
Benefits
Decreases stress.
Increases grey matter in the brain.
Increases your ability to focus improving productivity.
Enhances your immune system.
Decreases depression and anxiety.
Makes you more compassionate and increases feelings of connectedness.
Improved ability to feel and regulate emotion.
Has proven more effective at reducing mental and physical pain than morphine.
Increases intuition, your internal guide of people and situations will be much stronger.
How do I make it easy?
Use guided meditations - Sitting down in complete silence trying to clear your mind of thoughts is difficult. Guided meditations help to block out internal thoughts and give your brain something to focus on. They have soothing background music and a relaxing speaker guiding you through breathing techniques and visualization. I recommend using an app like Meditation Studio or YouTube for the largest choice of mostly free meditations. With such a big range of meditations particularly on YouTube, you can choose whichever subject or method you would like to work on.
Start Small - Start with 5 minute meditations, slowly building up length as you get used to the practice. I would recommend trying to do 20 minutes meditation a day, though many people feel the benefits from 10 minutes.
Use meditation for self-soothing - If your caregivers were not good at soothing you as an upset child, then it is likely that you will have poor emotional regulation as you did not learn these skills. You may find it takes you a long time to get over upset and that you struggle to feel strong emotions without them completely taking over your body. Meditation is a useful tool to learn for self-soothing. As soon as you feel yourself getting triggered take a break and do a ten minute mediation. It's important to do this as soon as you can find a private space, it will stop spiralling thoughts before they take hold.
Once you are comfortable using meditation to clear the clutter of your mind you can use it to start manifesting the life that you want to have. As proved by quantum psychics and Albert Einstein; thoughts create reality. There are many guided meditations you can use for manifestation, anything from your dream job or home to dream relationship.
Here is an example of a meditation I use:
