How to meditate. Part 2 of 4.

Here are five brief relaxation techniques:

A shower of peace: Think about taking a hot shower. As the water flows over your body and down your legs, it removes all your pain and stress and leaves you feeling refreshed and energised.

Honey treatment: Picture a pile of warm honey nestling on top of your head. As it melts, it runs down your face, head, and neck. It then covers your shoulders, chest, arms, and gradually your whole body, all the way down to your toes. Feel the sensual wave of warm liquid wash away your tension and stress, leaving you completely calm and refreshed.

Imagine a safe, protected, and quiet place, like a forest, a meadow, or a beach with sand. Use all of your senses to get the most out of place. Notice how calm and at ease you feel right now. Now, let that feeling spread through every part of your body.

Body scan: Start with the top of your head and move down your body. When you come to a place where you feel tension or pain, let it open up and soften, and then move on.

Relaxation response: Choose a word or short phrase that means a lot to you on a spiritual or personal level. Close your eyes and softly repeat this sound over and over.

DEEP RELAXATION:

Here is a meditation you can do whenever you have 15 or 20 minutes to spare and want to get rid of some of the stress from your busy life. It's also a great way to prepare for the other meditation techniques I share because it helps you to feel calm, refreshed, and in touch with yourself.

1. Find a place to lie down that is comfortable. Take off your shoes, loosen your belt and any other tight clothing, and lay on your back with your arms at your sides and your legs slightly apart.

2. Pay attention to your whole body, including where it touches the bed or floor.

3. Close your eyes and pay attention to where your feet are. Move your toes and flex your feet. Then, let go of as much tension as possible and let your feet melt into the floor.

4. Focus on the lower part of your legs, thighs, and hips. Think of them getting tired and heavy and falling to the floor.

5. Focus on the area below your belly button. Think of all your stress melting away, your breath getting deeper, and your belly opening up and getting soft.

6. Bring your attention to your upper abdomen, chest, neck, and throat. Feel these areas opening up and relaxing.

7. Focus on your shoulders, upper arms, lower arms, hands, and fingers. Think of them getting tired and heavy and falling to the floor.

8. Put your attention on your head and face. Feel the stress leaving your face, moving through your head, and down to the floor.

9. Look at your body from head to toe to find any places where you still feel tension or pain. If you find any, just picture them completely calming down.

10. Think of your body as a single field of relaxation with no edges or parts.

11. Keep resting like this for another five or ten minutes.

12. Then, move your fingers and toes, stretch your arms and legs, open your eyes, and slowly move up to a sitting position.

Check-in with yourself and pay attention to how you're doing. Do you feel less stressed out? Do you feel lighter or more open in your body? Does anything about the world look different? Now get up slowly and go on with your day.

Getting better at being aware uses a technique to meditate called "mindfulness," which means being aware of your experience as it happens. Mindfulness combines concentration, a highly focused state of mind, with a more open state of mind that just accepts whatever comes up. Because mindfulness builds like a house on a foundation of concentration, you need to strengthen and stabilise your concentration before you can move on to the full practice of mindfulness. That's why the first meditations I recommend focus on bringing your attention to one thing: your breath. The goal of mindfulness meditation is to be able to pay full attention to whatever is happening right now. When you've stabilised your attention by focusing on your breath, you can widen your awareness to include all sensations, inside and out, and eventually just accept whatever comes up, including thoughts, memories, and feelings. Even though this advanced technique is straightforward to learn, it can take years of practice to master it. However, after only a few weeks of regular meditation, you may notice that your awareness is growing.

Watching your breath may seem like a boring way to spend your free time compared to things like posting on social media or watching a movie on Netflix. In reality, the media have trained us to be addicted to stimulation by bombarding us with computer-generated images and synthesised sounds that change at a laser-like speed.

When you pay attention to your breath, on the other hand, your mind slows down to match the speed and rhythms of your body. Instead of six images per second, you take an average of 12 to 16 breaths per minute. And the feelings are much more subtle than what you see or hear on TV or on the Internet. They are more like the sights and sounds of nature, where you and your body came from. Also, one of the best things about using your breath as a meditation focus is that it's always there, always changing, and mostly the same. If your breath were completely different every time, it wouldn't give you the stability you need to focus. If it never changed, you'd fall asleep quickly and never have a chance to develop the curiosity and alertness that are so important to practising mindfulness.

When you invest in the stock market or work out at a gym, you want to see results, so keep looking at the quotes or the scale to see how you're doing. If you go into meditation with the same mindset, though, you'll miss the point: to let go of all your thoughts and just be in the here and now. One of the strangest things about meditation is that you can't benefit from it until you stop trying to change things and accept them. Then you get back a thousand times what you put in. When you first start meditating, you'll keep asking yourself if you're doing it right. But don't worry; there's no wrong way to meditate unless you're sitting and trying to figure out how well you're doing. You might feel like you're the best one day. You have a lot of energy, a clear mind, and easily follow your breath. You think, "great, I'm getting the hang of it now. The next day, your thoughts or feelings are so strong that you can't even feel your breath for 20 minutes. The point is not to do it perfectly but to do it repeatedly.

Come back tomorrow for part 3.

Be well.

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