Skip to main content

4 Meditation Practices That Also Promote Mindfulness

Transcendental meditation: Repeating a mantra, such as a word, sound, or phrase, is a part of transcendental meditation. In transcendental meditation the mantra allows you to concentrate and relax without having to exert much mental effort.  Some contemplatives call a mantra "that which protects the mind".  This practice helps ground our attention in the present to cultivate mindfulness.

Yoga: Yoga is a form of exercise as well as meditation. It involves a sequence of positions while concentrating on your breath, balance, and body alignment.  And this helps ground our awareness in the body and help us cultivate mindfulness.

Body scan: This easy-to-learn method of meditation which is ideal for beginners. During a body scan, you close your eyes and concentrate on one area of the body at a time, usually beginning with the toes and working your way up to the head. While doing this one makes a note of any feelings of tightness, relaxation stillness or other physical sensations in each body area. Practitioners will sometimes contract and then relax each body part individually.

Guided imagery meditation: This form of meditation as the name implies employs mental imagery to picture for example relaxing places and situations. This practice is usually guided by a teacher which walks you through such a process by guiding you to imagine the sights, smells, tastes, and sounds of each mental image sequentially.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Compassion Sees Through All Suffering

Constance Kassor, a scholar and teacher of Buddhist philosophy, comments,  "If you are genuinely able to have compassion toward all sentient beings without exception, then this means that you are also able to recognize the suffering of all sentient beings all the time."  This statement directly highlights the profound connection between compassion and the recognition of suffering in her statement. According to Kassor, if an individual possesses the remarkable capacity to genuinely extend compassion to all sentient beings without any exceptions, it implies an inherent ability to perceive the suffering experienced by all sentient beings incessantly. This perspective emphasizes the deep interdependence and interconnectedness of all beings, suggesting that a compassionate heart is not selective in its concern but extends boundless empathy to all. By acknowledging and embracing the suffering of every sentient being, one can cultivate a compassionate mindset that transcends boundar...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sound and Stillness In Our Practice

 We could say that we are immersed in a world of sounds. If you pay attention, almost every minute of your waking life is filled with some form of sound: most prominently the ambient sounds in our natural environment, including music and radio, conversations and messages, and the cacophony of thoughts in your own head. Considering all of this, we have to ask ourselves: How frequently do you get genuine moments of silence in our everyday life? If we reflect, it seems that we have the inclination for filling moments of silence or stillness with noise and distraction and all other activities in between. What is the reason for this? Why do we have this inclination towards filling up moments of silence with some type of activity?   Because it seems that silence makes us feel uneasy, and since silence makes us feel uncomfortable, we will automatically try to fill it up. Why? In moments of silence or stillness, we return to ourselves, which is not always an easy thing to do to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Recreating Your Own Life

Everything has causes and effects, and that only understanding such causes and that nothing is unchanging can yield to spiritual freedom. Envisioning this death and rebirth can lead to liberation and serves us as an exercise to rehearse how the mind shapes our reality, embodiment and environment.  Such that realising that nothing is permanent and everything is changing has the power to awaken within us our ability to recreate our lives moment by moment.
Post a Comment
Read more