Beginner Meditation Guide Step 2: Body Preparation
Meditate better by adding Yoga, visualization, and breathing exercises to your daily practice
Hello, and welcome aboard to the second step in the meditation guide (Click Here if you haven’t read the first one).
This guide’s purpose is to help you master meditation so that you can enjoy the benefits of this powerful practice.
My profile is dedicated to teaching you tools that bring value and joy to life. Click Here to learn how I benefited from meditating. I also wrote an article about scientific research on meditation.
Okay, now that we have an introduction behind us, let’s get right into the second step to mastering meditation!
First of all, I would like you to answer a few questions.
What is your experience with meditation? How do you feel about it? Can you concentrate while meditating? Is it hard for you to sit still?
One aspect which is often underlooked by meditators is the body. I think that too many people believe meditation is only about the mind.
6 months of mixing Yoga with meditation gave me more than just meditating for 3 years.
After practicing Yoga, I finally started to enjoy meditation and its effect on daily life.
Here is what you can do to improve your meditative experience.
Practice Yoga for better energy flow
Meditation requires stability and flexibility in the mind and body. Otherwise, it won’t work.
To improve those aspects do yoga asanas’ (body postures) and pranayama (breathing exercises). If you have trouble maintaining a stable posture during sessions, add visualization to your practice (in the later section).
To learn Yoga the right way, it’s best to find a skilled instructor who will teach you these exercises and provide feedback. There is no need to learn tens or hundreds of techniques. Even a handful will do the job.
The techniques you do should stretch all regions (head, corpus, arms, legs). During asanas’ breathe deeply and slowly, but don’t force it. Make sure to spend a while on each posture. You can check the clock or count your breaths (10–30 per position). Notice the feeling of stretching and observe your breath.
True benefits of yoga come when practicing regularly. Doing just 5 yoga asanas every day will greatly impact your meditation. I do a 5–15 minute sequence each morning and evening. It helps me start and end the day on my terms.
By practicing Yoga for at least 10 minutes daily you will develop a healthy routine, feel more relaxed, sharp, and in control of your life.
Breathing exercises are also important. They will teach you to breathe the right way. The brain requires lots of oxygen to function correctly (but don’t hyperventilate). Diet, stress, and bad habits can lead to developing shallow breathing. Not enough oxygen has severe health consequences and makes meditation less effective. That is why doing breathwork can help.
Now I will explain how to do a simple pranayama practice.
- Sit down in a cross-legged posture.
- Place your hands on your knees with palms facing upwards.
- Touch your index finger with your thumb (like in the image above).
- Take 3 deep breaths.
- Now cover your right nostril with your pinky and ring finger of the left hand.
- Take a deep breath in for 7 seconds (first fill your belly and then your lungs).
- Hold your breath for 7 seconds.
- Cover your left nostril and exhale for 14 seconds through your right nostril.
- Do this sequence at least seven times per session.
Practice daily for the most benefits.
Another effective practice to help you concentrate better and stabilize your posture is visualization.
Visualization
Lastly, I will describe a simple visualization technique for improving mental focus and stability in your posture.
- Sit in a cross-legged position or on a chair with your back straight.
- Take three deep breaths and exhale slowly.
- Close your eyes and begin to count your breaths from 0 to 10.
- Once you get to the last number, imagine a mountain. Notice how powerful and stable it is. Neither a man nor the weather can move the mountain.
- Now imagine you are that mountain; strong, peaceful, and stable. Nothing can shake your presence. Imagine how it feels to directly experience the wind, rain, sun, and lives of animals going on around you. All that happens is just a sensation that does not affect your position, it comes and goes, but you stay calm, strong, and stable.
- Visualize for at least 5–10 minutes per session.
- Practice it for a month each day. Afterward, do it whenever feel the need for stability.
This exercise should stabilize your posture. It can also have psychological benefits such as increased toughness, calmness, concentration, and mental stability.
Conclusion
Meditation alone can be tough to do and ineffective. That is why you can include other exercises to improve it.
Doing Yoga asanas, pranayama, and visualization techniques are beneficial complementary practices. They will fix common problems people experience with meditation; like lack of stability, body stiffness, back pain, distractions, overwhelming stress, and thoughts.
If you’ve managed to do the breath count meditation technique from step 1 of the guide, I’d like to congratulate you. Great job!
Continue practicing it for about a month with all exercises I mentioned in this article. After 1.5–2 months of doing breath count, I recommend switching to breath meditation as a go-to technique. It’s okay to do different meditations, but I found the breath meditation to be the most complete and effective. Find out about the types of meditation by reading this article.
Stay tuned for the next step in the meditation guide :)
Let the sage through effort and awareness, discipline, and self-control create an island which no flood can swallow.
Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha).
