Have you ever been interested in meditation? Do you know what meditation is? Do you know how it can help you mentally and spiritually?

Meditation is simply to still your mind for a specific period of time. It helps to quiet all the chatter within our minds we deal with on a daily basis. Meditation, when done on a regular basis, can be a very calming part of your life.

Meditation studies have shown that if you do meditation on a regular basis, it will help:

· Reduce stress

· Will help you control anxiety

· It will help with your emotional and mental health

· It makes you a lot more self aware of what is happening in your body

· It will help you to increase your attention span

· Helps to improve length of time to get to sleep as well as quality of sleep

· Helps control pain

When my health started changing after being ill for close to two years, I found myself intrigued by meditation and started looking into it more to get a better understanding of it. Based on all the positive information I found about how meditation can help, I started doing approximately 5-10 minutes of meditation a day. Any more than that, to start, is counterproductive because you are training your mind to slow down while meditating.

After starting to meditate and seeing how meditation was helping in so many areas of my life, I decided to see what would happen if I used it to try and fall asleep. I had a mini stroke at 32, also known as a TIA, and since then I have been on medication on a daily basis to help me fall asleep. When I took the medication, I would have about a ten minute window of opportunity to get to sleep and if I was unable to fall asleep in that time frame, I would either be awake all night or drift in and out in a very light sleep.

I found an app for my iphone called Smiling Mind. I chose a sleep meditation that I resonated with and started to listen to it every night to get to sleep. At first, I would have to listen to it two or even more times before I would finally doze off. As more nights that went by, I was able to wean myself off the long-term medications that I was on. Now, I just lay my head down and can be sleeping within minutes. If I am having a bad night and my brain doesn’t want to slow down, I go back to that meditation and within ten minutes, I am sound asleep.

If you commit to it, meditation definitely can help in many areas of your life. It can help you find an inner peace that most of us only dream of. So many people think meditation is just sitting legs crossed and meditating but, meditation techniques can be used for many different areas of your life. You can do a walking meditation, regular meditation, sleeping meditation, and so on.

The biggest thing with meditation is to just sit and quiet your mind and ground yourself. This will allow you to feel more in tune with yourself and allow you to move throughout the rest of your day in a calm and positive mindset.

You may say, I don’t know how to do that, or I don’t know where to start. Well, let me help you with that. You can reach out to me at mseguin@peacefulconnections.ca and I will give you a free one on one consultation to help you get started.