Meditation and Stress Relief

Here are some quick tips to help you meditate better for stress alleviation.

• Choose a location that is quite and you will not be disturbed. This can be a tough ask sometimes but you can never be truly deeply meditating while distractions are in abundance. I once locked myself in a bathroom stall to get some quiet time but you don't need to go that far!
  
• Use a visual focus to help you keep concentration and avoid distraction. A lit candle is traditional but I have heard of people using lots of things from just a point on a wall to a metronome to a bowl of water with a flower in it to just the rolling waves of the ocean. Just make sure it is entrancing and something you can stare at and let all your stressful thoughts drop away.
  
• Visualization! If you don't know what this is, basically it is imagining while meditating a stress free and relaxing environment that will almost trick your body and mind into lowering stress levels. Do not just concentrate on the visual aspect of such a place, also try to imagine the feel, smell, sounds and even taste of such a place too.
  
• Focus on your posture. Nothing is worse that starting to relax and meditate when you get a cramp in your leg or a sore back, it completely ruins it. Make sire your spine is straight and you sit in a comfortable way, this can be whatever you want really so whatever works for you but the spine bit is essential!

These tips are some that helped me get into a better meditative state and the visualization in particular helped me remove some of that stress which Improved my health by huge amounts. I was taking a few days off every month due to illness when I was stressed but using meditation I have hardly had a cold even for a year or so and I feel much more in control and confident.

There was one part I did just miss because I wanted to talk about a bit of a short cut, an easy way for better meditation that I found in the last few months that has helped with one thing that tended to be an annoyance.

That thing was the audio part of meditation. I can never seem to find a quiet spot and are easily distracted by noise so I have tried music, headphones to muffle noise and at least a dozen meditation CDs of various degrees of quality but never found anything that I liked.

However a new audio meditation tool called totally tranquil caught my attention which claimed to be able to synchronize your brainwaves to achieve a desired state or feeling. I was a bti skeptical but I do believe in the power of science and the mind and not mysticism so tried their free demo.

I now carry this in my iPod and use it to meditated nearly anywhere. It is my new favorite meditation tool and if you want to check it out click below and download a sample it is really good.