What is Mindful Meditation?

What is Mindful Meditation? 

Chronic Pain Sufferers Can Find Relief in Mindful Meditation

There are countless people who struggle with chronic pain. Sometimes the pain is caused by a medical condition and sometimes it’s a result of experiencing damage to the body through an accident or abuse.

Most people are familiar with dealing with the stress of the pain that feels in their body. But, chronic pain doesn’t simply affect the body. It can also impact how you feel emotionally.

It’s perfectly normal when you’re dealing with long term pain to experience anger about what you’re going through. It’s also normal to get upset when others have a hard time to understand the level of pain you’re experiencing.

If it’s left untreated, chronic pain can wear on a person so deeply that they can begin to feel depressed. Modern medicine tries to offer relief from chronic pain but in many cases, can only medicate the symptom rather than actually treat the condition.

You need something more than that.

By using mindfulness, not only can you find relief for your physical symptoms, but you can also find help for the emotional side effects that are common when you have to live with chronic pain.

When you practice the techniques in mindfulness, it can help ease the way that your body feels pain. What mindfulness does is teach people to focus on the sensations of the body along with the emotional feelings when they’re struggling with pain.

This approach is in direct contradiction to the way that some treatments suggest not thinking about the pain. But not thinking about can actually add to the stress, which can cause even more pain.

By learning mindfulness, you can decrease the pain and gain a sense of peace as well. With mindfulness, you find a quiet place and focus on each part of your body and how it feels in regards to the pain.

You don’t judge the pain and you don’t fight it. Don’t view it as something negative either. You just simply become aware of it. While you’re sitting, concentrate on how your body feels in connection with whatever it is that you’re sitting on.

Become aware of the chair and how the floor feels beneath your feet. Picture each area of your body relaxing. Keep your focus centered on your body and don’t view the pain as anything other than a neutral thing within you.

While you’re focused on your body, slowly go over each area of your body.

Focus only on that part. Become aware of the senses dealing with that part – such as whether or not it’s cold or warm.

If it feels free or restricted, if it’s against something soft or hard. The goal is to concentrate only on the senses rather than what the pain is doing in that area. After you practice mindfulness on each part of your body, slowly take in the whole body by becoming completely aware.

The mindfulness will help you be able to handle the pain emotionally and relax from the stress, which brings physical relief.

Mindfulness Through Mantra Meditation

Mantras are a way that people can meditate by using sound.  The sound helps the person to focus or to be fully aware of the present. What the sound is can vary. For some people, they simply use a sound such as “om.”

Others will use a word or phrase. Whatever it is that’s used is the key that the person uses to associate with clarity and perspective. Mantra meditation can help to achieve mindfulness, which will help the user to become self-aware, to find self-compassion and to calm stress.

Mindfulness achieved through mantra meditation can help bring peace to a mind that’s always racing with various thoughts. This mindfulness through mantra meditation can also help calm emotions such as anger, fear or sadness.

When you practice a mantra, it can call a mind that’s wandering with a multitude of thoughts back to the present. Meditation offers a lot of benefits but far too often what happens when people meditate is that they’re giving lip service to the meditation, but the mind isn’t on what they’re saying.

Their focus is skipping from a thought about what’s going on at home to what they have to get done at work. This kind of thinking doesn’t allow the user to get the most benefit from meditation because the focus is gone.

When you utilize mindfulness through mantra meditation, then you can keep your focus on the meditation. The reason that you’ll be able to do this is because the mantra helps you become mindful, which in turn keeps the thoughts focused.

Mantra meditation can help you achieve mindfulness because you can focus on the mantra itself.

You can focus on the sound that you hear, and on the way that your mouth moves to shape the sound or phrase.

You can also focus on the breaths that you take while you’re saying the mantra. For people who don’t want to say a mantra sound or phrase out loud because of they may be somewhere that they’re not alone, they can chant the mantra in their minds.

This will also help you to teach mindfulness. Mantras can be used to condition the mind to focus which is the core of mindfulness. By speaking aloud or mentally speaking the mantra, this works to anchor the user in the present and keeps the focus on the awareness of the present.

Some people use short, one-word mantras such as the word calmness or the word peace. If you’re not sure which mantra to use, you can search for some that will fit what you’re looking for. Some mantras will have a deeper spiritual meaning than others.

Visualization Meditation for Better Mindfulness Throughout Your Day

Visualization meditation is the practice of using meditation to focus on a visual item. By focusing the attention on the visual item, you can keep the mind focused. When you keep the mind focused, you stand to gain a host of benefits.

You’ll experience benefits physically. If you have blood pressure that tends to run a little higher, visualization meditation can lower your blood pressure. If you experience some emotional struggles like feeling fear or sadness, visualization meditation can help you overcome that.

By using visualization to increase your mindfulness throughout the day, you’ll discover exactly what your thoughts are doing to you.

You’ll see how “where” you focus your thoughts can impact your life.

When you don’t focus your thoughts, they can run the gamut from dwelling on the past to jumping ahead to the future that hasn’t happened yet. When your mind doesn’t keep focused on the present, you can limit the productivity and success that you can achieve in your life both in your personal and professional side.

Visualization meditation can increase your mindfulness so that you realize the times when you’re causing internal harm to yourself with your thoughts. You can even be caught up in thought patterns that keep you trapped in a certain mindset.

The problem with staying trapped in a certain mindset is that your emotions are tied to your thoughts. If you think sad or angry thoughts about the past, especially if those are things that hurt you and you can’t change them, then your emotions will quickly follow suit.

What you think about not only can sway your emotions, but these thoughts can produce physical side effects such as higher blood pressure, weight gain, and more. Visualization can help to strengthen your mindfulness which will let you stay focused on the current moment.

It can be especially helpful because the mind can start to wander.

When you have visual clues, these can bring you gently back into focus. The visualization process can help you to go through your day aware of the present but not judging it.

This, in turn, can allow you to be calmer even when there’s a stressful event taking place. Not only that but when you have better mindfulness, it means that you’ll be able to see things as they are which will allow you to make choices that aren’t based on the past or in the future.

When you use visual meditation, it can help you to see where you want to be in life and can help you to focus on present goals. Visualization can help you to have better mindfulness that can lead you to make changes that you want to make.

It can also make you in tune with your emotions, which can then be used to let go of any link with thoughts that might be impacting your health.