Meditation: A Balm for Stress
Want to know how to meditate? Look no farther than your phone! An abundance of meditation 101 apps give opportunities to easily experiment with several different meditation styles to find one that works for you.
Meditation is one of the most powerful tools for improving overall health. It is commonly believed that 85-90% of doctor’s visits are caused by stress and the American Medical Association has noted that stress was the basic cause of more than 60% of all illness.
We read "Curl up with your Smartphone and Relax" from last week's New York Times which includes some really interesting new mediation apps for your phone. We wanted to offer some additional tips for starting your own meditation practice including the announcement of our upcoming free, live meditation stream with Kim Love, coming in September!
Foods Impact on Stress Levels
One of the other top contributors to disease, of course, is diet. Imagine if we integrated a balanced diet while also concurrently reducing our stress levels.
Eating healthier foods has an immediate and direct impact on our stress levels and creates a perfect environment for adopting stress-related practices and meditation tools.
Inflammatory foods create inflammation, not just in our bodies, but in our mind and consciousness. Whether this mental inflammation is created by sugar, caffeine or an intolerant food, the impacts can be profound. Eliminate the possible sources of inflammation and watch the irritating irritability and heightened stress levels descend.
Rewire Patterns
As we change our diets and eliminate extra inflammatory burdens, we are also primed to cultivate a stress reduction practice. Meditation is one of the most effective. Studies have shown the significant impacts on everything from pain levels to Psoriasis and of course anxiety, stress and depression.
There are many different types of Meditation Styles and Techniques. One of our favorites is breath-based Meditation. Just as with food, once we begin eliminating the junk and replace it with alkalizing foods, our palettes are re-wired and our bodies begin craving the very foods that now sustain and enliven us; when we replace some of our conditioned negative thought patterns with attentiveness to our breathing, we create an alkalizing environment in our body and mind, and soon we will find ourselves craving our meditation time.
How to Start a Meditation Practice
The easiest way to begin a breath-based meditation practice is with instruction, whether through a CD, a classroom or one-on-one, and with repetition. Commit to practicing every day for 21 days, to see a difference. They say it takes 21 days to break a habit. It also takes 21 days to create a new one.
There are some very helpful instructional CD’s on the market today. Many of these explain the concept and philosophy of meditation while also walking listeners through meditation practices. Here are two of our favorite’s:
- Mindfulness for Beginners by Jon Kabat
- Insight Meditation: A Step by Step Course on how to Meditate by Sharen Salzberg
Kim Love with LoveLife Method will also be offering a Free Group Meditation via live telecast beginning September 7th. In the early days of LoveLife Method, all programs included daily food instruction and one-to-one meditation for a period of seven days. This created an ideal environment for instilling new habits. We love running into clients from those days who tell us they are still meditating regularly.
Over the past year and a half, as we have outgrown our capacity to offer one-to-one meditation, we have tried to figure out how to incorporate this vital tool it into our programs, again.
We are very excited to announce that we will be offering free meditation several days per week, beginning September 7th. Stay tuned for more details.
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