How to meditate at home for beginners

With our current pace of life, it is easy that from time to time we explode due to stress or that, even, we are angry for no reason or with sudden changes in mood. Meditation, far from being something spiritual, is above all a technique of relaxation and release of stress, as well as harmful emotions and feelings.

If this is your first time starting 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. Notes!

How to meditate correctly

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

1. Light candles, incense and play soft music in the background, if you want.
2. Sit in a position where you feel comfortable. Another option is to lie down, although it is more advisable to remain seated to be able to concentrate on meditation.
3. Close your eyes, take deep air through your nose, and slowly squeeze it out of your mouth. Do this for a few seconds to be more relaxed before meditation begins.
4. Start meditating, following the meditative technique you have chosen.
5. When you're done, don't open your eyes all at once. It's best to start by slowly moving your fingers and other parts of your body.
6. Finally, open your eyes slowly and enjoy the feeling of well-being.

Below, 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 that they are all valid. You just have to choose the one that best suits you. In fact, you can try various meditation techniques or change techniques as you need or feel like it. In this way, some of the best-known meditation techniques are the following:

• Guided meditation: this type of meditation can be done with Internet audios where a voice guides you on what you should be doing, 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 it would be us who directed the meditation.
• Leave the mind blank: this meditation technique is actually one of the most difficult, but it is very useful for all those people who have problems to silence their minds and that causes them not only mental exhaustion, but also internal conflicts.
• Meditate focusing on the breath: this would be a variant of the previous one, and would consist of focusing on making deep breaths.
• Mindfulness meditation: Another good way to meditate is to let thoughts float. Many times, we tend unconsciously 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 face all these types of inconveniences of our day to day.
• Physical meditation: The word meditation is very broad, and it doesn't have to be just sitting and standing still. There is another type of meditation, which we can find, for example, in Osho's books, which says that our body sometimes needs to physically get rid of some energies, such as anger. In this case, we could lock ourselves in a room and start hitting a pillow until we feel more relieved.

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 YouTube 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 chakras. For example, they may start by telling you to put yourself in a comfortable position and close your eyes. Afterwards, they can tell you to visualize how your fears, your anxieties and your stress come out of you and go to earth to be purified. They may also tell you to visualize how healing energy enters 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 the children.

Visual meditation for beginners

This would be very similar to the previous meditation, but with the difference, as we said, in 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:

• Visualize colors: In meditation, colors are considered to be healing. You can simply visualize a color while breathing relaxedly or you can visualize that color surrounding you, for example. The meaning of colors for meditation is the same as the meaning of candles according to their color. In fact, you can accompany your meditation with a colored candle. If you do not know which color to choose (both for the candle and for your meditation), you can choose white, since it contains all the colors and, therefore, it is 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 top of a mat, with the swaying of the waves, their smell and their peculiar sound.

Leaving the mind blank

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

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

How to leave the mind blank by focusing on the breath

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

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

You may also be interested in this other article about What are the best meditation techniques.

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 be aware of everything that happens inside us. That is, to let out all our thoughts without judging them and without analyzing ourselves.

It is said that if we learn to be observers of our thoughts and let them go free, most of them will leave and not ferment in our consciousness. That is, if for example one 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 feel an unforgivable grudge towards the other person, which would cause that with the passage of time that same hatred was 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 start relaxing the mind so that thoughts emerge freely. At first, we may be surprised at how difficult it can be, or we may even be frightened by some thoughts we had hidden. But remember: all those thoughts have been fermenting in you for a long time and are therefore 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 stand in the middle of the street, or in the middle of an argument, close our eyes and start meditating. Many unforeseen things happen in life and we must go ahead and act at that time. 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 the mind blank…

Physical meditation for beginners

Another variation of the previous one is to meditate in a more physical way. This is a type of meditation that Osho and other Orientals advise. Far from seeming like a simple method of “discharge”, it is considered a way of meditating, as it helps us release harmful tensions, energies and feelings. In addition, in this way, we will not pay with the people around us for these kinds of emotions.

• Tapping or screaming on the pillow: If you're angry, hitting or screaming on the pillow can be a good way to discharge all that kind of energy.
• Dance or sing if you are sad: if you have low spirits and you start dancing or singing, even if you do not feel like it at the outset, you will notice how little by little you feel animated and cheerful again. This is because when singing and dancing we give off hormones of happiness, in addition to being very fun practices.

Other meditation techniques for beginners

There are also other less common meditation techniques, such as the following:

• Meditate by painting
• Meditate with sounds
• Meditation with mantras
• Meditation with stones

The point is that you find the one that best suits you. In fact, … The best thing about meditation is that you can customize it!

Now that you know how to meditate at home for beginners, you may also be interested in this other article on Benefits of Meditating Before Going to Sleep.