Category: Mind

Easy Breathing Practices for Meditation:

While a part of meditation is getting in touch with your awareness, another part has to do with relaxing and clearing your mind. Breathing is an important tool to get to both of those places. Breathing may seem as simple as breathing in and out; however, this is not entirely the case.

For mediation to be successful, you will need to read up a little, listen to some CDs, and most of all practice a bit of breathing properly. Here are a few easy breathing practices to make your beginning mediation experience an enlightened one.

1. Proper Sitting for Proper Breathing:

First and foremost, make sure that you are comfortable. Sitting upright with a straight spine will help the energy flow and prepare you for proper breathing exercises.

2. Relaxation of the Body:

Once you have gotten into a comfortable seated position, it is important to relax your body to prepare it for breathing techniques and meditation. No matter how well you practice your breathing, if your body is tense, you will not have success. Begin by relaxing the muscles in your toes, moving to your ankles, and work your way all the way up to the top of your head. Once your body is in its relaxed position, then it will be time to begin your proper breathing techniques.

3. Pay Attention to Your Breaths:

In the beginning, simply pay attention to your breaths. Be attuned to the rhythm of the breaths, focusing on the in and out of those breaths. Do not try to control those breaths; just be aware of them. It is very important to be aware of how you are breathing in the beginning before trying to learn any new technique on how to breathe. Being aware is an important part of the process.

4. Pay Attention to Your Body:

Once you are acutely aware of how you breathe, it is important to pay attention to your body. If you are not experiencing your stomach rising and falling with each breath, then you may be tense in the moment. It is important to have your breath enter into the nostrils and leave through your mouth naturally.

5. Establish a Rhythm:

It is very important to establish a breathing rhythm. Once you become aware of your breathing, you will notice that it is easier to establish a rhythm. Once that rhythm is established, you will find your meditation to flow easily and you will get the most benefit out of that meditation.

Let us understand. You cannot reasonably hope to succeed by merely dreaming about success.

You surely cannot achieve success if you plunge blindly through your career.

You cannot really succeed without possessing some degree of personal magnetism.

When you began reading this article, you certainly possessed a measure of magnetic capacity, either physical or psychic. If you have energetically observed its directions, you have developed both varieties; but, above that, you have also combined them into one living whole, the magnetic personality.

This result has required at least a year of persistent effort. If you have arrived at this point in less time, you should go back and begin where haste first retarded your progress.

Magnetism is a natural growth.
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No matter how great may be your ability to read and understand books, that growth, that law, require time as well as intelligent effort. No matter how poor may be your ability in such respect, that growth is absolutely certain if you put reasonable time and genuine effort into its acquisition.

The giant trees of California were once puny saplings. The slow lapse of time has drawn nature into their mighty hearts. Magnetism can no more be acquired by the mere reading an article, or by hurried practice of its directions, than can these giants of the West be produced in the hot-house culture of a northern summer.

Magnetic growth is naturally slow. Its principles, its methods, and the results of its study, have to be deeply sunk into and absorbed and assimilated by the subjective self before the reaction of magnetism in the objective life can obtain. If you have read these lines correctly, you have learned that magnetic growth cannot be hurried. These statements are placed here because, had they appeared at the beginning of our work, the outlook would have seemed, perhaps, discouraging, but more especially because they would not have been understood. You now understand them because you have toiled, and you can afford to smile at such possible discouragement. You have paid an easy price for magnetic power, for the gains discount the pains.

Magnetism and practical life.
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The faithful observance of these suggestions has developed many surprises during the time occupied. The growth of magnetism involves intense and continuous concentration of thought upon the psychic field, and it is very likely that you may find it necessary to guard against that danger. The method of so guarding is briefly indicated below.

The sole value of magnetism consists in its practical application to everyday affairs. Success-Magnetism is not an accomplishment merely; it is a practical power. When rightly developed and used, it controls the subjective self in the concrete work of the objective. The definition of the goal you have been seeking now appears:

Success-magnetism is personal magnetism intelligently multiplied into actual life.

The first duty of man is practical sanity.

Success is in the blood. There are men whom fate can never keep down they march forward in a jaunty manner, and take by divine right the best of everything that the earth affords. But their success is not attained by means of the Samuel Smiles-Connecticut policy. They do not lie in wait, nor scheme, nor fawn, nor seek to adapt their sails to catch the breeze of popular favor. Still, they are ever alert and alive to any good that may come their way, and when it comes they simply appropriate it, and tarrying not, move steadily on.

Good health! Whenever you go out of doors, draw the chin in, carry the crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in the sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every hand-clasp.

Do not fear being misunderstood; and never waste a moment thinking about your enemies. Try to fix firmly in your own mind what you would like to do, and then without violence of direction you will move straight to the goal.

Fear is the rock on which we split, and hate the shoal on which many a barque is stranded. When we become fearful, the judgment is as unreliable as the compass of a ship whose hold is full of iron ore; when we hate, we have unshipped the rudder; and if ever we stop to meditate on what the gossips say, we have allowed a hawser to foul the screw.

Keep your mind on the great and splendid thing you would like to do; and then, as the days go gliding by, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your desire, just as the coral insect takes from the running tide the elements that it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought that you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular individual you so admire.

Thought is supreme, and to think is often better than to do.

Preserve a right mental attitude the attitude of courage, frankness and good cheer.

Darwin and Spencer have told us that this is the method of Creation. Each animal has evolved the parts it needed and desired. The horse is fleet because he wishes to be; the bird flies because it desires to; the duck has a web foot because it wants to swim. All things come through desire and every sincere prayer is answered. We become like that on which our hearts are fixed.

Many people know this, but they do not know it thoroughly enough so that it shapes their lives. We want friends, so we scheme and chase ‘cross lots after strong people, and lie in wait for good folks or alleged good folks hoping to be able to attach ourselves to them. The only way to secure friends is to be one. And before you are fit for friendship you must be able to do without it. That is to say, you must have sufficient self-reliance to take care of yourself, and then out of the surplus of your energy you can do for others.

The individual who craves friendship, and yet desires a self-centered spirit more, will never lack for friends.

If you would have friends, cultivate solitude instead of society. Drink in the ozone; bathe in the sunshine; and out in the silent night, under the stars, say to yourself again and yet again, “I am a part of all my eyes behold!” And the feeling then will come to you that you are no mere interloper between earth and heaven; but you are a necessary part of the whole. No harm can come to you that does not come to all, and if you shall go down it can only be amid a wreck of worlds.

Like old Job, that which we fear will surely come upon us. By a wrong mental attitude we have set in motion a train of events that ends in disaster. People who die in middle life from disease, almost without exception, are those who have been preparing for death. The acute tragic condition is simply the result of a chronic state of mind a culmination of a series of events.

Character is the result of two things, mental attitude, and the way we spend our time. It is what we think and what we do that make us what we are.

By laying hold on the forces of the universe, you are strong with them. And when you realize this, all else is easy, for in your arteries will course red corpuscles, and in your heart the determined resolution is born to do and to be. Carry your chin in and the crown of your head high. We are gods in the chrysalis.

Stress can cause many physical illnesses and should be kept under control in order to live a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life.  Below are some activities you can do to help alleviate stress.

1.  Meditate:

Meditation is a very good way to calm your nerves when you are under stress.  Spend a few minutes each day to just focus on your breathing, empty your mind, and let all your stress melt away.

2.  Exercise:

Spend 30 – 60 minutes each day to do some kind of exercise that you enjoy doing.  Exercise leads to the release of endorphins that help to alleviates stress and pain.  When you feel stuck on trying to resolve an issue, sometimes it helps to just take your focus off the problem and concentrate on something else that you enjoy doing.  By doing this, your conscious mind starts to relax and allow your subconscious mind to process the thoughts in the background.  Oftentimes, the solution will come up after your activity, or the next morning after you’ve had a good night’s sleep.

3.  Listen to your favorite music:

Sit back and listen to some comforting music for a while.  Just 5 or 10 minutes will help to calm you down and clear your mind.

4.  Read a book:

Immerse yourself in a book you enjoy reading for 15 – 30 minutes at the end of each day to switch your mind from an active beta state to a more relaxed alpha state.

5.  Play with your children and/or pets:

Children and animals have a very pure and bright energy vibration.  Spending time playing with them is not only essential for their emotional well-being, but will also take you to a much happier state of mind as well.

6.  Yoga:

Yoga reduces stress by encouraging deep, rhythmic breathing.  Doing 15 to 30 minutes of yoga-stretching exercises every day will help to lower your stress levels, relax your muscles, and improve your posture.

It is very important to do enjoyable things every day just for yourself.   You will become more happy, more loving, and have much more of yourself to give to others.  You deserve to be happy & healthy, so make sure that you are taking good care of yourself everyday, and work towards having a stress-free life.

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Health is a state of complete harmony of the body, mind and spirit.  When one is free from physical disabilities and mental distractions, the gates of the soul open.

~ B.K.S. Iyengar ~