Here are her top 10 meditation tips for first-timers and new truth blazers:
Keep your actions positive, because your actions become your habits. Keep your habits positive, because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive, because your values become your destiny - Gandhi
Meditation is a powerful Self- Empowerment tool and an ancient science of promoting habit change. All practices of self-development are a form of self-study to get to the truth of who we really are. The only way there is to be able to really listen within. It's about showing up, sitting and caring for yourself and creating space in between your thoughts. Regular practice will reset your state to encourage a shift energetically, reduce tension and remove any mental blocks in the form of negativity producing calmness and clarity so you can be the best version of yourself. Often times, those trying meditation for the first time may become despondent and inpatient when results aren't felt immediately.
The biggest challenge to 'getting out of our own way'' is first to have the experience, whatever the experience may be, without judgment or expectation of the outcome. When I advise my coaching clients, I recommend two key factors - commitment and patience - which coincidentally are the same ingredients required to manifest career and life goals You've perhaps heard it a thousand times before, but meditation begins with learning how to breathe properly. When we breathe to our full capacity, the red blood cells in the body become more oxygenated, which produces a state of receptivity and calmness. In this state we become more responsive than re-activate which promotes good thoughts and improves our interactions with others.
As Master Patanjali advises in his Yoga Sutras "when disturbed by disturbing thoughts think of the opposite."
For in every moment WE have a choice to choose fear or love to be the victor or the victim. Let us choose to be empowered and victorious through our meditation practice so we can live a life with more joy and ease. From years of coaching and guiding meditation classes, I've created a blueprint for a meditation practice that will guide you whether it is your first time, or 100th!
Here are my top ten tips for meditation for real life:
1. The environment: Decide on where and when to practice but if that changes too fine don't beat yourself up just learn to go with it. Do what feels right for you.
2. The posture: Seated upright in a chair legs uncrossed and hip width apart or on the floor crossed legged with a support under your seat. Keep your spine tall, as you ground down through your seat, lengthen up through the sides of your waist but keep your shoulder blades moving down towards your tailbone. Draw your navel towards your spine feeling a slight internal lift and shift. Pin the upper arm bones back to let your chest lift and widen, draw your elbows back to sit above your hips and underneath your shoulders, invite the chin in towards the back of the skull and let everything stack and settle.
3. The Gaze: Close your eyes and bring your internal gaze to the center of the forehead between the eyebrows.
4. The meditation: Is based on Kundalini meditation for rejuvenation, this is one of my personal favourites. The calming effects are immediate so when you feel overwhelmed or fatigued try this for an instant pick you up it's better than an espresso!
5. Hand position: Interlace the fingers and press your thumb tips together sitting with the palms facing up.
6. Duration + Time + Consistency: Be realistic and set your iPhone or a timer for three minutes (which is a good place to start). Then you can increase the time the more you practice building up to 11 minutes.
7. The breath: Remain with the mouth closed and start to bring your awareness into your side body (sides of the diaphragm) on the inhale let all four sides of the rib cage expand and as you exhale feel everything contracting back to your centre. If you struggle with that place your palms spread wide around the sides of the body. For beginners practice making the inhales as long as the exhales with no retention in between.
8. Give Gratitude: Take a moment and give thanks for this time and space to sit with yourself and maybe to everyone who helped you get to this place.
9. Using an affirmation or mantra: Witness, accept and feel each and every thought and then silently repeat: Inhale LET Exhale GO. An affirmation helps keep the mind focused on being in the present and having the experience rather than trying to 'do it'. After a while you can use a sanskrit mantra if it feels right for you this is a great meditation tool. Using the soothing sounds of the sanskrit language or a positive affirmation is incredibly healing.
10. Keep a meditation journal: where you can record and express your feelings, ideas and clarity from your meditation experience. This is very useful tool for introspection the observation of one's own mental processes and patterns so you can start to design some new ones.
Learn to meditate with Salema Veliu