Dalek Relaxation Tape https://youtu.be/e59guruVL4o
It relaxes me just knowing that it exists!
Guided meditation for beginners
31–40 of 133 posts
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#32The recording seems okay, but I find it really odd that the scripted voice says "feel your chest rise on an in breath, and feel it fall back down on an out breath." Chest-breathing is something to be avoided, especially in mediation, as it creates tension. The proper method of breathing is diaphragm-based breathing, otherwise called belly-breathing.
This is not a trivial issue for meditation, really strange that they get it wrong. They should be saying, "feel your belly rise on an in breath . . . " and there should also be some instruction on proper method of breathing, since many people are unaware of the difference.
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you've been doing it for a while your mind will be blank all the time, which sounds kind of bad but it's actually great, but the interesting thing is once you can control your own thoughts you'll start to realise that not all of them are yours. People are like radios and broadcast their thoughts, and you'll be picking them up without knowing it. You'll also be able to project them i.e influence people. Those pow…
If this were true I'd expect to see yogis running the world. Instead, running the world are people who I suspect aren't much into meditation.
Why would yogis want to run the world?
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#34There’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…
One small nit to what you've said. Breath control is core to yogic practices, as you've mentioned, but it is not part of most meditative practice. Meditation typically involves breath awareness, but specifically not control. The idea is to observe the breath as it is, not how we would like it to be.
And yet another nit must be picked. Breath awareness is simply one way to meditate. There are a broad array of different meditation techniques and some do involve breath control.
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#35The recording seems okay, but I find it really odd that the scripted voice says "feel your chest rise on an in breath, and feel it fall back down on an out breath." Chest-breathing is something to be avoided, especially in mediation, as it creates tension. The proper method of breathing is diaphragm-based breathing, otherwise called belly-breathing. This is not a trivial issue for meditation, really strange that they…
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Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#36There’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…
One small nit to what you've said. Breath control is core to yogic practices, as you've mentioned, but it is not part of most meditative practice. Meditation typically involves breath awareness, but specifically not control. The idea is to observe the breath as it is, not how we would like it to be.
I'm not the OP, but it is an important distinction, breath control (pranayama) is yogic.
While I can't speak for other traditions that feature meditation, at least in Theravada Buddhism, training of the breath is an essential part of the practice for the development of mindfulness (sati), beyond "observing the breath as it is." This gets de-emphasized in the modern vipassana movement focusing on "bare attention", but canonical interpretations of the Anapanasati Sutta [1] on the mindfulness of breathing to indicate that one only uses bare attention to "discern" long and short breaths, but "trains" oneself to become aware of the whole body, to calm bodily fabrication, and the rest of the items on the list. This is taken to mean that one can use right effort to breath in ways that are conducive to being aware of the whole body or ways of breathing that calm bodily fabrication, etc. So, while definitely not as gross as counting fixed durations like on the site linked, exerting oneself to influence the breath has a place in at least one very prominent non-yogic tradition.
[1] http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.118.than.html (perhaps the second most important sutta related to meditation in the Pali Canon, next to the Maha-satipatthana Sutta [2])
[2] http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.22.0.than.html
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#37I'm a full-blown a cynic, but after OCD and anxiety got the best of me, my therapist recommended I try meditation to both start and end my day, I've started to notice huge improvements. Can't recommend it enough. It's frustrating at first, the mind will just not stop wandering to worries every 10 seconds, but almost always on cue, the guided meditation would remind me "is you're mind wandering? no big deal, bring you…
When you've been doing it for a while your mind will be blank all the time, which sounds kind of bad but it's actually great, but the interesting thing is once you can control your own thoughts you'll start to realise that not all of them are yours. People are like radios and broadcast their thoughts, and you'll be picking them up without knowing it. You'll also be able to project them i.e influence people. Those pow…
you're not doing meditation any favors by promoting it in this light.
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#38Is it better to meditate with the sound of rain as provided with quietkit, or no sound at all?
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#39I started getting into meditation a few years ago after realizing the reason the world felt less 'real' than it used to was because I could never 'get out of my head' and have more direct interactions with external things. (For example, I finally went to Tokyo and moved to San Francisco and the difference each made was pretty minor—like looking at high res photos on the internet; it was a stark contrast to when I visited NYC seven years prior and was blown away just walking around. ) It soon became my number one priority after also realizing that all the times I remembered really enjoying myself, I was in that 'out of my head' state (you have a much better sense of presence, the 3Dness of things is much more apparent, smells, tastes, interpersonal interactions are all way richer).
Anyway, I decided to make a wide survey of meditation resources from old religious texts to modern neuroscience inspired teaching, to a number of things in between.
The first source that really made things click for me was watching some of the youtube videos from Ajahn Brahm. He's English, but trained as a monk in Thailand for many years, and has a background in physics. I think it's a combination that makes him pretty well-suited to explaining these concepts to techy Westerners. He's also got a light, humorous style to his lecturing, so it's easy to watch (if a bit cringeworthy [due to corniness] at times. And you'll get an occasionally bit of religiosity [he is a monk after all], but he mostly keeps it out.) I'd recommend this one for starters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEw2mHpVv9A
I also found bits of Jon Kabat-Zinn's "Full Catastrophe Living" to be very helpful in the early stages (it focuses on another form of meditation called 'body scan' which has some unique benefits, and can be easier for beginners. It's often the choice of style when teaching for therapeutic purposes).
Edit: I'll also add the way I see meditation instruction fitting into the practice: there aren't that many concepts, but each has extraordinary depth, so you just have to keep revisiting regularly; you'll often find that if you've improved in your practice, you can go back and see the same old lecture and interpret it totally differently, even though it made a kind of sense the first time. You'd think you wouldn't need to be told, e.g., "just allow your thoughts to arise and disappear on their own" like a hundred times, in different ways—but you probably do :)
Re: Guided meditation for beginners
#40http://www.10percenthappier.com is my meditation for skeptics site. Worth checking out as well. They have a lot of good videos and a podcast.