Meditation has been practiced by most religions all around the globe, including Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. Even though, in the past, meditation was a religious practice, it currently can be used even by people who aren’t associated with any religion. This ancient-old practice is a great way to take care of mental health, which has become an issue in recent years. There are heightened mental health problems, with many suffering from anxiety, insomnia, stress, and depression. The practice of meditation has been proven to help curb all these issues and leave your mind calm and less worried.
Following are The 5 Best Meditation Courses Online For Beginners :
- The Essential Guide To Meditation – Mind Body Green
- Meditation for Beginners- Yoga International
- Online Meditation Training- Loka Yoga School
- Meditation for Relaxation- Sura Flow
- Learn how to Meditate- Yoga International
We have thousands of thoughts passing through our minds every minute of the day. When we meditate, we sit down in silence, concentrate on our breath and watch these thoughts without judgment. The goal of meditation is to bring your awareness back to the present moment, which is best achieved through bringing back your attention to your breath and watching your thoughts. Doing this makes us more aware.
Article Contents
What exactly is meditation?
Meditation is a set of techniques intended to encourage a heightened state of awareness through focused attention. You can also define meditation as the act of training the mind. The mind often wanders thinking about the future, the past, and never about the present moment. You’ll always find yourself worrying, fantasizing, daydreaming, or even fretting by thinking about the future and past. But when we meditate, it brings us to the present moment and gives us tools to help us become less frightened and stressed and be calmer and kinder to others.
When we meditate, the goal isn’t to stop thinking; the goal is to observe the thoughts. When observing your thoughts, you don’t need to judge by thinking “that’s a bad thought” and all that. All you’re required to do is observe, don’t run with the story, but look at it like a third party. You need to pay attention to your emotions, physical sensations, and thoughts when meditating. Doing so will help you see things more clearly.
What are the benefits of meditation?
If you’re constantly stressed, anxious, and tense, you need to try meditation. Meditating can help you resolve all these pent-up emotions and restore your calm and inner peace. The best thing about meditation is that you don’t need special equipment or a place to do it. You can even practice it at your office desk and reap the benefits. The benefits of meditation include:
- Reduces stress- Stress often results in lack of sleep, depression, anxiety, high blood pressure, and the release of inflammatory chemicals. By meditating, we are mitigating all these possible side effects of stress.
- Gaining a new perspective on stressful situations. Sometimes when a particular situation stresses us, it’s all we can think about. But once you meditate, it helps you gain a new perspective and stop stressing about the situation.
- Enhances self-awareness- Certain forms of anxiety may help you develop a greater sense of awareness and how you relate to those around you. By becoming self-aware, you can recognize your thoughts and those that can be harmful. By being more self-aware, you can recognize your thoughts and shift the thought patterns into a more positive perspective.
- Lengthens attention span- People who listen to meditation frequently tend to have a longer attention span. Meditation helps increase the strength and endurance of your attention.
- May reduce age-related memory loss- Meditation can help improve attention span, which may help keep your mind young. A study by UCLA found that long-term meditators had better-preserved brains as they aged compared to those that didn’t meditate.
- Meditation can help with addiction- Meditation practice helps one gain control because it affects the self-control regions of the brain. This practice has been used to help people suffering from addiction. The best type of meditation for addiction is mindfulness meditation.
- May help control pain- Many doctors recommend practicing meditation to control pain, especially for those undergoing excessive pain. It’s not that meditation makes the pain go away. It just helps you recognize that you shouldn’t pay too much attention to it and that it helps one feel less pain because they aren’t thinking about it all the time.
- Makes you kinder and loving- By practicing loving-kindness meditation, you’re fostering compassion for yourself and others. It helps your brain pick up on other people’s emotions.
- Improves sleep- We experience insomnia at some point in our lives, especially when going through hard times. Practicing meditation helps you stay asleep longer and lessens insomnia severity. By meditating frequently, you’ll be able to redirect your racing thoughts, which often lead to insomnia.
Which meditation is recommended for beginners?
There are many types of meditation, and you might be wondering where you’re going to start as a beginner. Well, worry no more, we’ll break down easy meditation types that beginners can try, and you can choose which one works best for you after trying it at least once.
- Guided meditation: This type of meditation is easier for beginners because it includes listening to a meditation recording or going to a class where an instructor guides you through your practice. A guided meditation practice can attract abundance, physical well-being, or others. If you’re using an app, you can choose the one you’d like to practice.
- Mindfulness meditation- You can practice meditation when eating, walking, or observing your environment. Sometimes you can even practice mindfulness meditation when seated in silence. It helps you accept all that arises without judgment and also works by helping you address what’s going on in the moment and release it right away.
- Loving-kindness meditation- If you want to change how you view others and your perception of the world, then you should practice this meditation. It helps you develop love and friendliness for others. It helps increase social connectedness, general well-being, and relief from illness.
- Mantra meditation- During mantra meditation, you can use a phrase, sound, or word and repeat it silently to keep your mind focused and serve as a tool to reach higher states of consciousness. Some mantras are meaningful, while others are chosen for their sounds and vibration. It helps curb a wandering mind.
- Breathing meditation- Most times, our minds pay more attention to the future or past while ignoring the present, which can change the future. Concentrating on the breath brings our focus to the present and can help us make more conscious decisions.
5 Best Meditation Courses Online For Beginners
As a beginner, finding the type of meditation that best works for you might be hard. These online meditation courses will help you start your meditation journey, and soon you’ll be able to meditate on your own.
This meditation course by Mind Body Green is a comprehensive guide to creating a daily meditation or practice. This course offers you guidance in every type of meditation. It also offers meditation exercises that you can use anywhere and at any time. This class will help you if you’re a beginner who wants to know all about meditation, you experience stress, anxiety, and insomnia, and you want to know everything about meditation. This meditation course will help you live more mindfully and feel more present and alive.
When you’re a meditation beginner, you’re quite unsure where to begin and what to do, and that’s why Yoga International has this beginner program for all who want to start practicing meditation. This program will help you learn how to sit and use the breath-counting technique to focus your mind. You will also learn how a simple mantra can help you harness focus and attention. As a beginner, meditation can be hard to figure out, and this particular program will help you navigate meditating so you can comfortably do it alone afterward without feeling as if you’re clueless.
Check out this article for the 3 best meditation courses on yoga international.
The most common complaint when beginning a meditation practice is always “I don’t know how to,” and this online meditation training is how you’ll know to meditate, what to do and how to navigate it. There are different meditation techniques, and not all can suit you and your needs. This meditation course will teach you over twenty-five meditation techniques, including the most popular and well-known ones. By learning all these meditation techniques, you will know which style best suits you, how to practice it, and harness the benefits.
Finding consistency is the best thing you can do when starting your meditation journey. This 21-day yoga program will help you turn meditation practice into a habit. They say it takes 21 days to create a habit, and that’s what Sura Flow is helping you achieve with this yoga program. This program will give you instructions as a beginner, three daily journal prompts, and 21 daily guided meditations. This meditation program will be a stepping stone to you achieving greater depths and inner peace from your practice.
This Yoga International meditation program will help you learn how to observe your mind and cultivate mental focus even when you’re in the midst of distracting thoughts and emotions. You gain the confidence and ability to meditate daily at home. You will also learn the five stages of meditation, the connection between breath and emotion, and other meditation techniques to help you harness awareness. This course will only take you six hours to complete, but by the end, you will be able to practice breathing and meditation at home without doubting yourself.
Final thoughts
Meditation has many physical, mental, and emotional benefits. Suppose you’re looking for a way to improve focus, reduce stress, or deal with chronic pain, addiction, or depression. In that case, you should try meditation alongside other medical practices to see if it’s right for you. You will surely love the practice and even fall in love with it. Meditation is an easy way to harness inner peace, calmness, and mental clarity; even if you don’t get anything out of it, at least you will have these. There’s a lot of evidence showing that meditation may do well if you practice it regularly. Start today, and you will notice the immense difference in a few weeks or days.
