mindfulness meditation
Morning Meditation | 30min
Chair Yoga + Meditation | 28min
Body Scan | 12min
Change the Inner Channel | 15min
Microcosmic Orbit | 17min
You've probably heard about the benefits of mindfulness and meditation for relaxation, focus, compassion, relationships, sleep, and more. Training our minds (another way of saying mindfulness) is probably the most important and beneficial thing we can do with our time.
Imagine you were given a puppy and told you would have this dog with you at all times for the rest of your life. Would you want to train that puppy? You bet! Well, our minds are puppies we are stuck with, whether we like it or not, and we better get to work training them, so that we have some agency over this wily organ of ours.
There are many ways to train the mind. The most basic principle of mindfulness and meditation is that we choose an object or activity for the mind and we bring it back to that goal over and over again each time it wanders off, trying to do something else.
For example, if our goal is to keep our mind on the feeling of breathing in the belly, we might do that for five seconds until we start going through our to-do list or rehashing an argument we had with our sister last week. As soon as we notice that our mind has gone off-track (the puppy is wandering away), we gently and compassionately bring the mind back to the feeling of breathing in the belly. We may have to do this a hundred times in a meditation session, and that's okay. In fact, I would call that a great practice! Each time we come back, we sharpen the sword of wisdom and compassion.
Here at Somatic Spiritual Counseling, we like to combine mindfulness with bodyfulness as much as possible. So many of the videos above involve breathwork, body awareness, and movement. We're not just training our minds, but we're training our whole selves to come together and all go in the same desired direction. Over time, these practices tend to settle both mind and body.
Try the videos for yourself and let us know how it goes at hello @ somaticspiritualcounseling.com. Or, if you are looking for more in-depth or personalized meditation instruction, reach out to us here.