Perhaps you’ve heard or read all the research pointing to the fact that a consisted meditation practice can boost your happiness, lead to better health outcomes and even reverse aging. Once you start reaping the benefits of meditation, you won’t want to go back for more.

Here are some powerful tips and tricks for first-time meditators to get started.

Tip #1: Use a Guided Meditation

For beginner meditators, guided meditations are better than trying to sit quietly on your own because being so new to the practice can be frustrating. Listening to a guided meditation on YouTube or downloading the app Headspace onto your phone will allow you to go deeper and get more out of your meditation when you’re first starting out.

Eventually, as you become more advanced, you won’t need to rely on a guided meditation and can practice on your own.

Here is one meditation that I recommend: a 20-minute guided meditation by Vishen Lakhiani.

Tip #2: Practice Daily

Imagine going to the gym one day and getting in an amazing workout. Then, you go home, look in the mirror and decide your body looks exactly the same as it did yesterday, so you quit.

We know that in order to see the physical benefits of our exercise regimen, we need to work out consistently—at least three times a week. Meditation is no different.

If you meditate once and declare that you didn’t notice any difference on your wellbeing or your stress levels so you’re going to quit, that’s exactly the same as the gym example.

Just like going to the gym, we have to go every day, or at least most days, in order to see the benefits.

It’s better to practice every day, rather than just 3-4 times a week because once it becomes a habit, it becomes a part of your routine and you don’t need to force yourself.

Tip #3: Start Small

I started meditating with just two minutes a day. Knowing what I know about habit formation, that it’s often best to attach the new habit to an already established habit, I decided to meditate every morning after brushing my teeth for two minutes.

Every week I added on another minute, until a couple months later I was consistently meditating for 20-25 minutes each morning. It became an established habit, I started to notice how amazing I’d feel afterwards and I started looking forward to it in the same way I looked forward to my workouts.

Now, I meditate for one, sometimes two hours each day. This is unusual though, and you don’t need to meditate for more than 10-15 minutes to reap the benefits, so start small.

The two minutes a day is simply to establish the habit, to get your emotional brain on board. This is the part of the brain that just wants to lay in bed all day and binge watch Netflix and eat gummy worms. You have to convince this part of you that—hey, it’s only two minutes. Let’s do it.

Then your emotional brain says, “Only two minutes? Ok…I guess I can do that”.

On the other hand, if you try to convince your emotional brain that you’re suddenly going to meditate for 30 minutes each day, it will put up a huge barrier full of sabotage. “What’s the point? Let’s just sleep longer”.

Tip #4: Try Different Meditation Techniques

Just as there are several different ways to exercise (running, HIIT, the gym, going for a hike, swimming, Pilates, Yoga, etc.), there are several types of meditation practices.

You could try guided meditations, loving kindness meditations, creative visualization, walking meditations, mindfulness meditations, transcendental meditation, or even Yoga. Yes, yoga is also a form of meditation.

Start with the type of meditation that most appeals to you, but if you don’t like the meditation, try another one. It’s good to mix it up from time to time.

So there you have it. I hope this was helpful and I wish you an amazing journey in your discovery of meditation and the powerful benefits.

If you need extra motivation, read how meditation can help you heal from illness.

The post How to Start a Meditation Practice: 4 Must-Know Tips for Beginners appeared first on Cancer Free For Life.

We all know that meditation relaxes you, keeps you focused and can decrease pain, but can it also contribute to healing? The answer is a resounding “yes”. Here’s why.

Meditation Promotes the Body’s Natural Healing Response

Dr. Herbert Benson, founder of Harvard’s Mind/Body Medical Institute, coined the term, “The Relaxation Response” to describe meditation that releases a biological cascade of chemicals and brain signals that slow your body down and allow your body to heal itself naturally.

He found that meditation deactivated the stress (fight or flight) response and triggered the parasympathetic nervous system, allowing for your body’s natural healing responses to kick in.

The fight or flight response left on for too long in our body is what contributes to illness or dis-ease in the first place. Meditation simply turns this off and the parasympathetic (rest and digest) system turns on. Find out more about Dr. Benson’s meditation protocol here

Meditation Supercharges Your Immune System

You could take Vitamin C, Zinc, Vitamin D and other immune boosting supplements, but you could also meditate. Since your immune system responds to both positive and negative thought patterns, meditation allows your immune system to do its job by maintaining a positive mental environment.

One UCLA study showed that HIV patients who meditated maintained more CD-4 cells, the cells responsible for keeping the virus under control

According to Deepak Chopra, meditation stimulates the parts of your brain that control the immune system. And Dr. Joe Dispenza, in his research, has shown that meditation (in just 7 days) increases Immunoglobulin A, which identifies nasty invaders such as bacteria and viruses so they can be destroyed by the immune system.

Meditation Actually Changes Your DNA

While not too long ago, doctors attributed most illnesses to a case of bad genetics, we now know from the emerging field epigenetics that very few diseases (like 5%) are actually genetic. The vast majority of them are actually influenced by epigenetics.

What’s that you ask? In a nutshell, it’s the cell’s ability to either turn on or turn off a gene expression. And whether a gene expression for cancer turns on or off will depend on lifestyle factors—stress, diet, exercise, etc.

So basically, it’s not your genetic code that determines whether you get a disease. It’s your lifestyle that influences changes in the genes. Hence, most diseases are influenced by lifestyle, which would turn on “good genes” and turn off “bad genes”.

For example, let’s say two women have a genetic predisposition for breast cancer. One drinks a bottle of red wine every night while the other rarely drinks. The wine guzzler gets a breast cancer diagnosis while the other doesn’t. No surprise. That’s epigenetics.

Or perhaps one woman struggles with stress, anxiety or some other negative emotional issue. The cancer gene will turn on, or get expressed. That’s also epigenetics.

Let’s then say that the stressed out, wine-guzzling woman decides to start meditating each day for 20 minutes. Would she still get cancer? We can’t say for sure—that would be oversimplifying.

But it would definitely reduce her chances of the gene being expressed, just as cutting out alcohol or exercising would. Recently scientists discovered that meditation can lengthen telomeres, the genetic material that influences how slow or quickly we age. Wow.

Don’t believe me? You can read about it here and here.

Meditation Interrupts the Subconscious Beliefs and Perceptions that May Contribute to Illness

When I first got serious about this meditation business, I was awakened to all my negative thoughts. I was too harsh on myself and constantly judged myself.  

With meditation, I learned to ease up on this. As I’ve mentioned, the opposite of disease is being at ease. There could be negative thought patters, conscious or subconscious, that you are not aware of which you will become aware of through meditation.

Since negative thoughts and feelings are one of the major factors that contribute to illness in the first place, becoming aware of them is key. Meditation helps you do that and interrupts the negative thought pattern so you can change it.

Dr. Bruce Lipton, author of The Biology of Belief discusses this in detail.

“…if I have a belief, then the function of the mind is to manifest that belief so it becomes reality. For example, if I have a belief that I’m going to die of a disease because someone told me so, then the function of the mind is to convert that belief into physical manifestation, and it’s no surprise that my belief becomes reality. But it’s not because I have a terminal disease that I end up dying; it’s because I believe this disease will kill me.”

Meditation Makes It Easier to Make Healthy Choices

When you meditate consistently, you feel less gravitational pull towards alcohol, fried foods or sugar. These unhealthy substances just don’t seem to have the same level of temptation.

Don’t get me wrong. I still have a sugar addiction myself, but meditation has definitely calmed it down. It’s made me aware that I only crave sugar when I’m stressed or overwhelmed.

So now, when I’m craving a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, I simply ask myself—Why am I so stressed? I can then choose to meditate, go for a walk, or indulge in my craving without judgement.

Also, because meditation itself reduces the stress, the cravings don’t come up as often in the first place.

I credit meditation with helping me to give up alcohol and clean up my diet. It has made me more aware that making positive choices for my health empowers me and makes me feel good, and that the 5 minutes of bliss from half a pint of ice cream is not worth the way I feel afterwards both mentally and physically.

Visualization, Has Proven to influence Our Health in Radical Ways

Visualization, one form of meditation, has been shown in countless studies to have a substantial effect on health outcomes. You can read about many of these studies in the book,   How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body by David Hamilton, Ph.D.

You can also look at Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work. There are hundreds of testimonials on YouTube from people who credit meditation and/or visualization techniques for their healing. This one   is one of my favorites.

It’s about a woman who had stage 4 cancer, went through several western and alternative treatments, but was told there was nothing more doctors could do for her. Then she discovered meditation.

In a 7-day Dr. Joe Dispenza meditation retreat that I attended last July, I personally heard from a number of people who told me that meditation was responsible for dissolving their tumor, healing multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s Disease, and many others.

How to Get Started with Meditation  

Wow. Powerful stuff. We’ve learned that meditation can help you heal by eliciting the body’s relaxation response, supercharging your immune system, changing your DNA, interrupting harmful thought patters, helping you make healthier choices, and visualizing.

So how do you get started?

For beginners, I definitely recommend starting with guided meditations. You can find a number of good ones on YouTube. Here is a good place to start. I also recommend Dr. Joe Dispenza’s meditations for powerful transformations, but they are a little longer, usually 45 minutes to one hour.

While I have heard stories of people who healed with one powerful meditation, more often I’ve heard people tell me that they healed chronic conditions such as cancer after having done meditation 1-2 hours a day for sometimes a year or two, or some even said 4-6 hours of meditation a day.

Also, I don’t recommend using meditation in lieu of conventional medical treatment. Instead, think of it as a tool in your healing toolbox that will give you better results than conventional treatment alone.

If you would like to know more about how to meditate, read this article here.

The post 6 Powerful Reasons Why Meditation Should Be Part of Your Healing Regimen appeared first on Cancer Free For Life.