Tag: meditation

We know that meditation has many benefits but sometimes we don’t know why it is good for us 🙂

Sometimes we might need something a little more personal to make meditation a regular part of our lives. Something that connects us to the new habit so we keep going, also when we are not feeling “it”.

This was at least the case for me. For years I kept trying to make meditation a regular practice. Sometimes meditation was in and sometimes it was out. It was like this for a long long time.

It was not until I got very clear on why I was doing it that I managed to make it a regular part of my life. 

Here I want to share with you my top three reasons for meditation in the hope that you will find your reasons in there.

When our reasons are clear it’s makes it easier to go over hindrances that always come up when we are getting in a new habit that supports our health and well-being.

Here is the video were I share my top three reasons.

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Rather read a transcript of the video? Transcript of the video is at the bottom of this page.

Here is are my three reasons – in a short summary.

1. Calm my mind.
   Meditation helps to calm my mind and clear my head. When we slow down our breath, our thoughts slow down with it. When the thoughts go slower through my racing mind, I can notice them and maybe clear them. It improves focus and concentration, cultivates compassion for myself and others and therefore makes my less judgmental and less reactive. All hugely beneficial.
   
2. Calm my body.
   Meditation helps me to slow down my breathing which can slow down my heart rate and blood pressure. That somehow helps me to release some of the stress that lives in my body. I can breath in calm and breath out stress and tension. On a cellular level it regulates our stress hormones (increases dopamine and melatonin, modulates serotonin and decreases cortisol and norepinephrine). I didn’t manage to get the biology of stress into the video even with my Bachelor degree in biology. I should be sprinkling my biology knowledge everywhere 😉
   
3. Reminds me that I’m more than my thoughts, my emotions, my actions and what I do in life.
   When we are in meditative state we can notice our thought processes which lead to emotions and feeling and which then can lead to actions (or no action). If we can notice our thoughts/thoughts patterns and emotions/feelings that follow in meditation, that means there is something more. Someone that is noticing that process. That is the true inner self, inner consciousness, metacognition (whatever you would like to call it) that is not affected by all the others (thoughts, emotions, actions). That knowing brings me calm, just knowing there is more to me.
   There is also a gap between all those the inner self, the thoughts, emotions/feeling and action/not action. Meditation cultivates those gaps and helps me to be less reacting, sometimes at least 🙂
   
   Those are me top three reasons for meditating regularly.

Find your own personal reasons to keep you connected to your meditation practice and make it easier to keep going when going gets tough. 

My hope for you that once you found your reasons, getting settled in a meditation practice will be a breeze 🙂

Love from Iceland,
Ragna

Transcript of the video

Hi. It’s Ragna and today I want to talk to you about meditation. We know that meditation has many benefits, but we might need something more personal to keep up a practice or set up a meditation practice.

At least that was the case with me. Until I got very clear on my why it was hard for me to maintain a regular practice so I want to go over my top three reasons so you can find yours in there.

So, my number one reason is just to calm my mind. It helps me to calm my mind and somehow to clear my head and that’s important in the time and age that we live in when we have so many different things coming at us up all the time. So, it helps us calm down and clear our head, and when we are meditating, we slow down our breath, and when we slow down our breath.

We also slow down the thoughts, so the thoughts don’t go as fast so we can notice them, and maybe clear them, and not react to them.

So, that’s my first reason, and it also helps us to be more focused, and improves our memory, or at least I hope so. And it can also help us cultivate a little bit more self-compassion, and also compassion for others. So, it makes us a little bit less judgmental which I think is helpful in today’s world.

And number two is just to calm my body. As I said before when we meditate our breathing slows down, and that slows down our body, slows down the heart rate as well as the blood pressure, and it somehow helps me, at least, let go of some of the stress that lives in my body, so I can somehow breathe in calm and let go of stress when I breathe out.

And it really helps so I can just let go of the stress and not keep it in my body.

And then the third and the most important reason, for me at least, is that it helps me remember that there is more to myself than thoughts and emotions and actions and what we do.

So, when we are in the meditation state, we are following our thoughts or noticing our thoughts, and that means there is someone to notice the thoughts.

So that means there is something more than just the thoughts, the emotions, and what I do. There is some inner core. Some inner self, inner consciousness, that is following the thoughts. So, if we can follow our thought processes that means there is more of me, or my inner self is watching, and that for me, is important.

And also, to cultivate the gap between myself and the thoughts, and then the emotion, and from that we take action, or we don’t take action.

So, it can make me a little bit less reactive, at times, and I think that helps with emotional regulation. And that is actually shown in research, that it helps with that. So, we can better regulate our emotions, and that’s important to have.

And it helps me bring more calm into my life, and just to remember that I am more than my thoughts and emotions, that calms me down.

And so now it’s time for you to find your reasons and see if it cannot help you set up a regular practice.

Love,
Ragna