Guided meditation for beginners
quietkit.com
Guided meditation for beginners
1–10 of 133 posts
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#2Cool! Love to see anything that promotes mindfulness and makes it more accessible to folks. Interesting that the sessions are so short -- I'm not sure I've seen anything shorter than 10 minutes before.
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#3Has anyone experienced an improvement in any physical diseases/ailments from meditation?
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#4"The guided meditations from QuietKit offers three main benefits to anyone who uses them:
Decreased stress and anxiety
Increased focus
Increased mindfulness (the ability to be aware of what's occurring at any given moment, but being able to choose how to act, as opposed to just reacting)"
Are those three benefits purely anecdotal?
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#5Has anyone experienced an improvement in any physical diseases/ailments from meditation?
I think meditation's primary effect, perhaps its only noticable effect for most, is lowered anxiety via learning how to focus thought which tends to lead to less worrying and such. Less anxiety means better sleep, earlier bedtimes, less cortisol in the body, etc. Over time these can affect us physically in an beneficial way.
An eight week mediation course shrinks the part of the brain involved in anxiety:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05...
From an anecdotal perspective I found taking a anti-cortisol herb (Rhodiola and Ashwaganda) gave me a comparable, but stronger, effect compared to what 30-45 minutes daily meditation gave me.
Meditation lowers cortisol:
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#6"The guided meditations from QuietKit offers three main benefits to anyone who uses them: Decreased stress and anxiety Increased focus Increased mindfulness (the ability to be aware of what's occurring at any given moment, but being able to choose how to act, as opposed to just reacting)" Are those three benefits purely anecdotal?
My money is on yes, unless they've developed a unit of measurement for focus and mindfulness which seems unlikely.
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#7"The guided meditations from QuietKit offers three main benefits to anyone who uses them: Decreased stress and anxiety Increased focus Increased mindfulness (the ability to be aware of what's occurring at any given moment, but being able to choose how to act, as opposed to just reacting)" Are those three benefits purely anecdotal?
There has been quite a bit of research surrounding mindfulness meditation for a couple decades now.
Here are some cursory studies addressing your three questions. They are easy to find on Google Scholar.
Decreased stress and anxiety http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/acm.2010.0142
Increased Focus (specifically for people on the ADHD spectrum) http://www.ahc.umn.edu/img/assets/20825/MindfulnessADHD-Zylo...
I have to imagine mindfulness is a difficult concept to disentangle from meditation itself, however there do seem to be attempts to create measures for this: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1073191107313003
Here's a meta-analysis summarizing many studies about the effects of meditation. Effect sizes seem consistently positive albeit on the smaller side: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-012-0101-x
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#8Curious to hear from folks who have consistently meditated for a prolonged period of time (6mos+). What effects have you noticed?
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#9There’s also a well-known affect on blood-pressure (lowering) that comes from the breath control that’s at the core of most meditation practice.
http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/stress-raising-your-blood...
I don’t think that the cause of this is completely understood, but CO2 is a potent vasodilator. I’ve seen hatha yoga (physical yoga) practioners ditch hatha for prana-yoga (breath yoga) because they said it's a more powerful way to get to wherever yoga takes you.
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#10Curious to hear from folks who have consistently meditated for a prolonged period of time (6mos+). What effects have you noticed?
The benefits are subtle but I am more aware of my emotions. Things that used to upset me don't have this deep impact anymore. I feel I am more deliberate in how things affect me.
But I also studied a lot with Buddhists. I am not sure if meditation only without guidance of a teacher will have much of an effect.