Meditation and Yoga : Guide to Healthy Lifestyle

Meditation and Yoga plays an important role in human well-being, originated in Ancient India, it is a very vast subject. Yoga is an wonderful technique for your mental and physical wellness. Now it is recognized worldwide. UN has also declared 21st June as World Yoga Day.

Chakras healing are also an important aspect of meditation to work on different energy centre. Yoga is the umbrella term used to denote all methods to achieve your true original nature. Meditation is a part of Yoga, which deals with “breathing techniques”, “mind observation” and “diverting your energy from outside to yourself” and working on your thoughts.

Meditation helps in stress management, hypertension, sleep management, anxiety, improve sleep quality, enhance self awareness and will boost your confidence. This will bring clarity to your thoughts and also improves your immune system. The key factor in achieving regular meditative state is patience. The natural your practice become, the more you achieve. Do it daily, even 10 minutes of an morning and evening Yoga postures and meditation have positive impact in your lifestyle.

What is the Difference between Yoga and Meditation

Yoga is the union of the self with supreme soul. For, that purpose we have to connect with our blissful state and true nature. It is a practice to go beyond our thinking mind and see the things with unbiased mind. Meditation is a part of Yoga and deals with thoughts and breath pattern. It helps in aligning our thoughts and breath in right manner, thus improving our overall body immunity and mind efficiency.

Yoga is a step-wise methodology to achieve the certain physical and mental wellness through physical postures, breathing exercises and sitting in quiet place and reflecting on your self.

 

What is Yoga and Why We Need This?

There are mainly 4 types of Yoga –

  • Bhakti-Yoga – It deals with devotion towards God.
  • Karm-Yoga – It deals with helping the needy and offering the karma to God.
  • Raj-Yoga – It is the highest stage of meditation. It deals with connecting to higher power in meditation.
  • Hatha-Yoga – This deals with physical postures.

You can try any of these Yoga, It will help you in diverting from negativity and connect you with your true self. You can also start with one practice, depending upon your nature and interest. And after you can gradually move to Raj-Yoga to feel absolute peace.

After practicing, you will start experiencing peace, Don’t try to hold on to that experience. To make your mind peace natural and everlasting, spend time alone with yourself, you have to be alone with your thinking mind. Self-questioning is important for better spiritual growth.

You need to proceed slowly and patiently, but deeply into Yoga. You are Investigating your thoughts and not asking the third person about this question. Finding the right answer without accepting any authority in inner inquiry is appreciated.

How to start meditation as a beginner

First of all find a suitable Yoga Mat. If you are a beginner, start with some easy physical postures. You need to be patient with yourself. It is better if you learn in initial stage from some professional Yoga teacher. It will save your time and enhance your progress.

Some Asanas to start with Bālāsana (Child Pose), Bhujaṅgāsana (Cobra Pose), Marjaryasana (Cat Pose), Setu Bandhasana (Bridge Pose), and Vajrasana (Diamond Pose). Vajrasana helps in relieving anxiety and can be performed after meal.

Breathing meditation is also good for beginner, you can focus on your breath without tempering its flow. Just watch it and it will improve and become deep and slow. When you are in stress, your breathing pattern changes and become faster. When, you are relaxed, you must have observed right breathing pattern. Ancient Yogis have found out this patterns around 5000 years ago.

Yoga and Meditation - Bridge Pose

What are the Benefits of Meditation and Yoga

Stress Management

Yoga is helpful in reducing stress and improving brain efficiency. It will relax your mind and help you make better decision. It will deal with body repair work and deal with burnout at work places.

Increase your Concentration

Your thoughts will eventually becomes fewer in number and much clearer with a peaceful mind state, the quantity of thoughts reduces, thus improving quality and helping you concentrate on one thing at a time. Thus, increasing productivity and saving your time. Meditation and Yoga are the best ways to boost your mind energy.

Good Immune System –

This is a proven fact, an peaceful mind has a positive impact on your body, thus improving overall immunity. Your mind is your biggest healer. Asanas help in increasing the flexibility, strength in body and mind and thus improves overall immunity of your body.

Attract Positivity and Repel Negativity –

Our mind has a long association with a set pattern of negative thoughts. Just like our daily habits, we start forming thinking habits, the same thinking cycle every day. You may have observed certain negative and positive emotions pop up automatically after a fixed interval of time. Meditation and yoga help reset thought patterns.

“When your mind becomes more Satvik (pure), it automatically chooses positive thoughts and repels negativity.” In the case of Tamsik’s mind (impure), the mind automatically gets attracted to negative thought patterns.

Enhance your Work Efficiency –

If you do, meditation regularly and spend time with yourself, see and accept your shortcomings, your overall personality will improve. If you try to concentrate hard on your work, you will feel more lethargic. Yoga will help in handling your daily work and managing your stress.

You can try to practice certain physical Yoga postures to start taking control of your mind back. It is very difficult to sit and observe yourself in the beginning. This will certainly help increase work efficiency.

Sleep Management

Meditation helps in improving the quality of your sleep. You will feel more fresh, need less sleep with stress free life.

Reducing Negative Feelings –

Meditation helps in reducing negative feeling, it helps in restoring positive feelings.

 

What is the Best Time for Meditation and Yoga  

Meditation and Yoga are self-occurring processes, effortless meditation is true meditation, and the different schools of meditation and yogic practices are only designed to achieve this natural state.

Morning is the suitable time to start any practice. There is a term called Amrit-vela (also called Brahma-muhurta) in the Spiritual fraternity. When there is absolute silence you receive more cosmic energy. At this portion of time, the Yoga will have more impact as compared to evening session.

This time is from 3 A.M to 6 A.M when all the nature starts its function. You will get positive results meditating in the morning time. Evening time is also beneficial but not as powerful as Morning Session.

If you are not a morning person, do not wake up forcefully in the morning, take time and start slowly to make an early morning habit.

Scientific Evidence Regarding Yoga and Meditation

Mind plays a vital role in fighting diseases. All kind of physical exercise and Yoga postures helps in improving Mind function and directly contribute to better physical and Mental well-being. However, Yoga is far more beneficial as Breathing is involved with the postures and will boost the Immune system and overall Mental and Physical well-being.

A study shows, that 15 minutes of daily meditation can alter your genes and operate with more health benefits. Various studies show the therapeutic effects of Meditation and improve the mental and physical condition of the person suffering from the disease.

Experiments were performed on different groups of women and the result suggested that women practicing meditation for the past 2 months have reduced a significant amount of anxiety among women compared to other groups. This study indicates that meditation can be used as alternative medications for the treatment of anxiety disorders.

How much Time to Spend Daily on Yoga and Meditation

It depends from person to person, the more time you spend on Yoga, the more benefits you get. You must take small steps and increase slowly to have more impact. In this case, less is more, more patience you have, more it becomes spontaneous and natural and you can perform meditation for a longer hour with ease and comfort. Regular meditation reduces your breath rate per minute, thus increasing your overall efficiency and quality of your sleep. You can start with daily 20 minutes of practice in the morning and evening.

Conclusion –

The average human mind either lives in future or in the past, thus missing the opportunity of living in the present moment. Meditation helps in reducing unwanted thoughts by living in the present moment and makes the mind powerful. For beginners, it is advised to perform yoga with an expert and professional teacher.

Everyone loves to live a peaceful and blissful life. Our thoughts get influenced by worldly affairs and we get stuck into this materialistic lifestyle. Materialistic things can only provide you with temporary happiness. It cannot give you real happiness.

Chakra Healing is one of the important meditation technique to work on different energy center.

Meditation is a gift to start getting back control of your lifestyle. It’s a good idea to start with something and improve slowly to get everlasting results. You can start your meditation journey with Deep Breathing, Alom-Vilom, Om chanting, Yog Nidra commentary and certain basic Asanas like Cobra Poae, Cat Pose, Child Pose and Bridge Pose.

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