Being Mindful Series: What is Meditation?
“Being Mindful” is a blog series for anyone curious about mindfulness and meditation. Feeling stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed with life? Mindfulness and meditation are powerful tools for improving your mental health. In this series, we'll explore the basics of mindfulness, how it can help you, and how to implement it into your life.
The words “mindfulness” and “meditation” are often used together. We broke down what mindfulness means in my last post called “What is Mindfulness?” (be sure to read that one first), so now let’s dive into meditation.
What’s the difference between mindfulness and meditation?
While mindfulness is a way of being and relating to yourself and the world around you, meditation is practicing mindfulness in a formal, intentional way. It’s saying to yourself, “I’m going to sit down and be mindful on purpose.”
Meditation can be done in lots of different ways, the simplest of which being just focusing on your breath. Literally paying attention to the feeling of air entering then leaving your body. Try it for a few seconds right now…
…congrats, you just meditated!
Another great way to get started with meditation is through guided meditation tracks. Instead of sitting in silence and trying to “clear your mind” (which is impossible and not the goal, more on that in a future post), guided meditations gently walk you through a calming thought process so it gives direction to your thoughts.
There are pages and pages of guided meditation videos on YouTube, and many of them are really well done, but if you don’t want to sift through hundreds of videos, I recommend the Insight Timer app.
What is Insight Timer?
Insight Timer is my absolute favorite meditation app, and probably the one thing I recommend to my clients the most. While you can purchase a premium plan for added features, their free version is spectacular. I’ve been using it for years and never felt the need to upgrade. No this is not sponsored, I just really love them.
Their guided meditations are categorized by whatever you’re feeling or want to feel at that moment. Need some morning motivation? There are tracks for that. Having trouble falling asleep? Having a panic attack? Have a migraine? There are also tracks for that. You can also filter by length, so if you only have five minutes, you can still fit in a meditation.
If you’re trying to see what this mindfulness thing is all about, here’s a challenge for you: do one guided meditation every day for a week and see how it feels.
Here are some of my favorite tracks on Insight Timer to get you started:
