Meditation Tips for Absolute Beginners

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You want to start meditating more consistently, but you find yourself struggling.

As you’ve probably heard, meditation is great when it comes to improving mental health. It can also elevate your mood, and generally help you live your life with more awareness.

However, developing a meditation habit is difficult. As a beginner, meditating for more than a few minutes can even be excruciating. You fidget, get lost in ridiculous thoughts, and are soon frustrated.

In this article, we’ll review essential meditation tips on how to start regularly meditating. Read on!

Drop Your Expectations

When learning how to start meditating, one of the pitfalls people fall into is setting expectations that will inevitably get frustrated. As a result, they quickly quit meditation.

Meditating isn’t a quick fix that will magically make you feel better. Many of the benefits of meditation are subtle and build over time. Sometimes, your practice will go well, and sometimes it won’t.

By having expectations of what should happen, you are creating the potential for failure. Drop your expectations and come back to your breath.

Schedule a Time and Stick to It

How to get into the habit of meditating? Discipline! As a beginner, it’s very difficult to be consistent if you’re relying on motivation.

For this reason, you should have a clear scheduled meditation time. Whether you’re feeling it or not, meditate at the time you’ve set.

There are days when you won’t want to do it. Those are the days you most need it!

Have a Designated Meditation Space

To create a habit, it’s good to have a ritual. You’re conditioning yourself through repetition.

Eventually, you’ll be able to call on your meditation skills at any time of day. But to build those skills, it’s good to train your body and mind to switch to meditation more easily.

One of the key meditation tips for beginners is to have a dedicated space for your practice. Keep your meditation space clean, uncluttered, and in as quiet a spot as possible.

Ease Into It

Are you just back home from a tense workday? Don’t expect to sit right away and reach the deepest meditative states. That’s the best way to quit right away.

Be understanding with yourself. Ease into your practice, take a few minutes to relax, and prepare yourself for sitting. And if today you’re just feeling too agitated, that’s okay too.

But even or especially if you’re feeling agitated, you should still sit and do your practice. It might be a difficult meditation, even an annoying one, but it might also just help you calm down and release your emotions.

Take a Few Deep Breaths

Before officially starting your meditation, take a few slow, deep breaths. It’ll help you relax and get into a more propitious state of mind.

If you want to relax a bit further, you can choose to lengthen the exhale. Make the out-breath twice as long as the in-breath. It’ll calm you down and you’ll be ready for a good session.

Sensations Are Normal

Many meditators experience a variety of sensations as they get deeper into the practice. Even as a beginner, it is possible to feel things like tingling or a bit of pressure.

If this happens to you, no need to be alarmed. Keep sitting and watching your breath. The sensations will come and go, pay attention to what remains when everything transient has gone.

Avoid Moving Around

When you’re struggling in your session, it’s tempting to want to move around as you feel restless. You’ll want to scratch your nose, adjust your posture, even look at a stain on the wall.

However, moving around like this prevents you from building momentum in your practice. It breaks your concentration and you’ll need to get back to it each time.

Feeling distracted is fine. You’re not here to judge yourself. If you have an urge to move, notice it. Stay with it, don’t try to push it down, but don’t indulge it.

Don’t Try to Suppress Your Thoughts

One of the best meditation is tips for beginners is to not have too rigid an attitude. Some people approach meditation like a boxing match: it’s you against your thoughts, and the thoughts are winning.

By trying to suppress our thoughts, we end up making them stronger and get stuck in loops. You have a thought, then try to block it out, and start admonishing yourself for having a thought. This would never end.

Instead, envision meditation more like a flow. If a thought arises, accept it, do not create more thoughts around it. And if you do, that’s just fine.

You might find that your mind chatter starts quieting down a bit. Even if it doesn’t, at least you’re not punishing yourself any longer for it.

Emotions Can Come Up

At some point in a meditation journey, it’s not unusual for repressed subconscious content to come up. Some people find themselves crying without apparent reason, or have realizations about themselves.

If one day you are meditating and start feeling upset without knowing why do not panic. Apply meditation to these emotions as well.

Let them arise, and give yourself permission to feel them. But do not get engaged in them to the point you forget about your meditation. Acknowledge and observe them, but realize they are not your true nature.

Watch Out for the Spiritual Ego

Sometimes, people start building up an ego around their meditation practice. They might start giving lessons to everyone or feel that they are superior to others in some way.

The spiritual ego is insidious and can take us by surprise. However, it has nothing to do with the purpose of practicing meditation and does nothing for our well-being.

The cure for a spiritual ego is simply to retain our humility and remember that we don’t know everything. And we don’t need to.

Apply These Meditation Tips to Get Started

By applying these meditation tips, you’ll be in a good position to start meditating regularly. As simple as it seems, the key is simply to take sit down every day and practice.

Rely on discipline rather than motivation. Have a scheduled time, designated space, and stick to it. Ease into the meditation, take a few deep breaths to start with.

Drop your expectations, and don’t judge yourself for the thoughts that might arise. Simply come back to the breath every time.

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