How to meditate at home for beginners

With our current pace of life, it is easy for us to burst from stress from time to time or even be angry for no reason or have sudden mood swings. Meditation, far from being something spiritual, is above all a relaxation and stress release technique, as well as harmful emotions and feelings.

If this is your first time to meditate, you may find it useful and interesting to learn about various forms of meditation as well as professional advice. That is why in this article we explain how to meditate at home for beginners. Take note!

How to meditate correctly

In order to meditate correctly, before starting, you must follow these steps :

Light candles, incense and put soft music in the background, if you want.
Sit in a position in which you feel comfortable. Another option is to lie down, although it is more advisable to remain seated in order to concentrate on the meditation.
Close your eyes, take a deep breath in through your nose, and exhale slowly through your mouth. Do this for a few seconds to be more relaxed before the meditation begins.
Begin to meditate, following the meditative technique you have chosen.
When you’re done, don’t snap your eyes open. It is best to start by slowly moving your fingers and other parts of your body.
Finally, open your eyes slowly and enjoy the feeling of well-being.

Next, we will detail everything you need to know to meditate.

meditation techniques for beginners

First of all, you should know that there are many ways to meditate, and they are all valid. You just choose the one that best suits you. In fact, you can keep trying different techniques of meditation or go changing technique according to need or you want. Thus, one of the most popular meditation techniques are as follows:

Guided meditation: this type of meditation can be done with audio from the Internet where a voice guides you on what you should do, such as imagining that you are in the sea on a mat, in order to relax.
Visual Meditation: Another type of meditation is to use inner visualization. It would be similar to the previous meditation technique, although with the difference that this time we would be the ones to lead the meditation.
Going blank: This meditation technique is actually one of the most difficult, but it is very useful for all those people who have problems to quiet their minds and that causes them not only mental exhaustion, but also internal conflicts.
Meditate focusing on breathing: this would be a variant of the previous one, and would consist of focusing on taking deep breaths.
Mindfulness meditation : Another good way to meditate is to let your thoughts float. Many times we unconsciously tend to put limits on what we think. That not only harms us, but also alters our mind.
Meditate with your eyes open: Some meditation techniques suggest that in life, when unexpected things happen to us, we will not be able to stop and sit down to meditate to calm down and know how to act. For this reason, they suggest that learning to meditate with our eyes open would help us to face all this type of inconvenience in our daily lives.
Physical meditation: The word meditation is very broad, and it doesn’t have to be just sitting still.

Next, we will explain more about these some of these types of meditation that we have just commented on.

Guided meditation for beginners

As we said, guided meditation consists of letting someone guide your meditation. It can be a natural person or a video, for example. Among the most frequent guided meditations, we will find:

Visualize energies: some guided meditations are based on the visualization of energies, and usually relate it to the chakras. For example, they may start by telling you to get into a comfortable position and close your eyes. Then, they can tell you to visualize how your fears, your anxieties and your stress leave you and go to earth to be purified. They may also tell you to visualize healing energy entering your body.
Visualize situations: there are also guided meditations that tell you to visualize relaxing situations, such as being in the middle of a forest listening to birds. On the other hand, they can also tell you to visualize how your breathing is slowing down, or how your body is relaxing. In some schools they usually put this kind of guided meditations to children.

Visual meditation for beginners

This would be very similar to the previous meditation, but with the difference, as we said, that here we are the ones who choose what we visualize and how much time we dedicate to it. Among the types of guided meditation you can choose from, you can start with:

Visualizing Colors: In meditation colors are considered to be healing. You can simply visualize a color while you breathe slowly or you can visualize that color surrounding you, for example. The meaning of the colors for meditation is the same as the Meaning of the candles according to their color. In fact, you can accompany your meditation with a colored candle. If you do not know what color to choose (both for the candle and for your meditation), you can choose white, since it contains all colors and is therefore a universal color.
Visualize something calm: You can also visualize something that relaxes you, if all you want is to calm down with meditation. You can, for example, imagine yourself in the middle of the sea, on a mat, with the waves rolling, their smell and their peculiar sound.

Leave blank mind

Leaving the mind blank, although it sounds very basic, is something really difficult, especially for a long time. In general, our mind tends to start thinking about pending tasks, things that you would like to do, conversations that we had with someone, sudden reflections… Does all this sound familiar to you? Well, maybe you should know that it is a symptom of stress.

Today’s society, especially in the Western world, moves at a very fast pace: we have to go everywhere fast and do things fast because we don’t have time. Although when we get home we feel calmer, in reality, our mind is still working at the same accelerated pace. That is why learning to make your mind go blank with meditation can do us a lot of good at the level of mental and physical health, since if our brain continues to work nonstop, we will be self-generating stress without realizing it.

How to leave a blank mind by focusing on breathing

Since clearing your mind is very difficult, we recommend that you start small by doing the following:

Light candles, incense and put soft music in the background, if you want.
Sit in a position in which you feel comfortable. Another option is to lie down, although it is more advisable to remain seated in order to concentrate on the meditation.
Close your eyes, take a deep breath in through your nose, and exhale slowly through your mouth. Do this for a few seconds to be more relaxed before the meditation begins.
Start meditating. You can try to focus on your breath at first so that your mind doesn’t start thinking.
When you’re done, don’t snap your eyes open. It is best to start by slowly moving your fingers and other parts of your body.
Finally, open your eyes slowly and enjoy the feeling of well-being.

Mindfulness meditation for beginners

Mindfulness meditation is a practice that has become popular in the West thanks to Jon Kabat-Zinn. It is a type of meditation that aims to help us become aware of everything that happens inside us. That is, letting out all our thoughts without judging them and without analyzing ourselves.

It is said that if we learn to be observant of our thoughts and let them free, most of them will go away and not ferment in our consciousness. That is, if, for example, a person gets angry because the other has stomped on his foot, with mindfulness he will let the anger go as it comes. Otherwise, it could settle in the depths of the person and could end up feeling an unforgivable resentment towards the other person, which would cause, over time, that same hatred to be transmitted to other people when they approached them, for fear that they would step on his foot again.

To practice mindfulness, you just have to prepare for meditation, as we have explained, and begin to relax your mind so that thoughts freely arise. At first it may surprise us how difficult it can be, or even some hidden thoughts may scare us. But remember: all those thoughts have been fermenting in you for a long time and, therefore, they are not “natural”.

Meditate with your eyes open

The most common is to meditate with your eyes closed. By doing so, it is easier to focus on the meditation itself. But in real life we know that this is not the case. That is, we can never stop in the middle of the street, or in the middle of a discussion, close our eyes and start meditating. In life many unforeseen things happen and we must go ahead and act at that moment. That is why this other way of meditating can help you learn to meditate in any type of situation.

To meditate with your eyes open, you can start by focusing your eyes on a specific point and follow the type of meditation that you like the most: visualization, leaving your mind blank…

Physical meditation for beginners

Another variation of the previous one is to meditate in a more physical way. Far from seeming like a simple “unloading” method, it is considered a way of meditating, since it helps us to release tensions, energies and harmful feelings. In addition, in this way, we will not pay with the people around us for this kind of emotions.

Hitting or yelling at the pillow – If you’re angry, hitting or yelling at your pillow can be a good way to release all that kind of energy.
Dance or sing if you’re sad : if you’re down and start dancing or singing, even if you don’t feel like it at first, you’ll notice how little by little you feel upbeat and happy again. This is because when singing and dancing we release hormones of happiness, as well as being very fun practices.