5 elementos essenciais para spirituality
JM: An early, small study suggests that mindfulness may help boost the immune system. By serving as a buffer against stress, mindfulness may also lower the risk of heart disease.
Meditation is the practice of lightly holding your attention on an anchor, such as your breath, and gently bringing it back there when it wanders.
Bring your attention to the sensation of air moving into and out of your body. On the inhale, notice it traveling into your nose, your throat, down into your lungs. Notice the rise in your chest and belly. On the exhale, notice how the air leaves your body.
We know we’ll encounter the challenges we talked about here while we’re learning to meditate. When they pop up, we can return to this article to refresh ourselves on the basics and tips to get back on track.
You’ll want to fidget. You’ll want to shift around in your seat. You’ll notice weird twinges and feel itchy in the strangest of places. You’ll be bored and wonder how much time is left until you can stop. You’ll daydream. You’ll think about all the other things you need to attend to.
Life is rarely ever quiet anyway. We can go into our meditation practice expecting that noises will happen, whether it’s loud music from a neighbor, a dog barking in the street, a truck backing up, or sounds in another room at home.
In this age of constant distractions and long hours, it’s difficult to find even a few minutes of time to reflect. Yet finding that time and space can help ease the stresses of your demanding working life.
Let go of any thoughts that arise. Attend to your breath. Doing so will allow you to let go of the stresses of the day so you can return home and be fully present with your family.
Not bad for a few minutes of sitting in silence, right? And it just gets better from here. Read on to learn more about meditation and how to start meditating yourself.
Meditation does have an impact on physical health—but it’s modest. Many claims have been made about mindfulness and physical health, but sometimes these claims are hard to substantiate or may be mixed up with other effects. That said, there is some good evidence that meditation affects physiological indices of health. We’ve already mentioned that long-term meditation seems to buffer people from the inflammatory response to stress. In addition, meditators seem to have increased activity of telomerase, an enzyme implicated in longer cell life and, therefore, longevity. But there’s a catch. “The differences found [between meditators and non-meditators] could be due to factors like education or exercise, each of which has its own buffering effect on brains,” write Goleman and Davidson in
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A helpful trick for dealing with thoughts and other distractions in meditation is to name them as they arise. It’s just like it sounds: When a thought comes into your mind, silently say “thought.” When a bit of emotion starts to stir, simply name it— “sadness,” for example.
Participants also reported that they became more assertive in saying ‘no’ increase positive vibrations to others in order to lessen their load of responsibility, allowing them to become more balanced in acknowledging their own as well as others’ needs.
Mindfulness makes us more resilient: Some evidence suggests that mindfulness training could help veterans facing post-traumatic stress disorder, police officers, women who suffered child abuse, and caregivers.