Refreshing Your Mind
By Tyler Greenberg of Meditate Life, meditatelife.org
As we meditate, we build up our meditation skills. I have been meditating for years. In fact, I have been practicing meditation for most of my life. I consider my meditation skills to be pretty solid. Even with all that, the guided meditation pack that I am working my way through is a pack of guided meditations for beginners and I am still learning new skills.
Yes, even after all of this time meditating I am learning new meditation skills from a course for beginners. They aren’t skills that I am completely unfamiliar with, but they are skills that I haven’t focused on in my practice before. One big thing that I am working on is resting focus. I always like to focus my attention on a particular sensation when I meditate, but now I am working on placing my focus on every sensation. Instead of focusing on my breath, for example, I am focusing on everything my body is feeling, hearing, and doing.
Along with building new skills, returning to a beginner guided meditation course has helped me to further solidify the skills I already have. I notice that it is easier for me to meditate without losing focus and I feel better after meditating. I am able to find new enjoyment in practices that I have been doing for years.
This isn’t the first time I have returned to some guided meditations for beginners, and I would suggest that everyone does it every once and awhile. I try to do them at least every year. I will also go back if I have something particular I want to work on or if I feel like I am getting “bored.”
I do not stay too long with these meditations, but I do practice them exclusively for a while. I will use them for about a week every time I do this, but I only use them for that week. If you decide to go back to beginner meditations for a while, I suggest you do them for a good amount of time like I do. Doing them for a week lets me focus on whatever I am trying to develop. If I don’t, I find that I just do it once and don’t actually build the skill. I like to do a 7-10 lesson course of meditations over the week because it is the perfect amount to do a meditation a day. After the course is finished, I take the skills I developed and learned and apply them in my normal meditations.
I have found great enjoyment and growth in returning to some beginner guided meditations, and I hope you can too. If you are looking for good guided meditations, check out those from Ease Meditation!