If you work extra hard, but things aren’t falling into place, find a solution, not just any type, but a 10 minute mindfulness meditation solution. Mindfulness meditation manages anxiety and stress effectively while ensuring your life has meaning. But how do you implement mindfulness meditation?
You might be astonished to learn that only 5 – 10 minute mindfulness meditation daily positively impacts any stressed individuals mentally.
The frequency and persistence of the meditation matter more than the time used. So, why not meditate 10 minutes regularly instead of 1 hour a week?
What Is Mindfulness Meditation?
Mindfulness meditation is a conceptual training exercise that trains you to slow your wild thoughts, relax your mind and body and forget about negativity.
The mindfulness part is the mental state that requires total focus on the presently happening (meditation) for acceptance and easy acknowledgment of your sensations and feelings without passing harsh or any judgment on yourself.
You can use many techniques and methods to implement 10 minute mindfulness meditation, but one that works best is deep breathing and mind and body awareness.
Similarly, mindfulness meditation doesn’t require intense preparations such as having essential oils, mantras, or candles—it only needs your concentration, 5-10 minutes of free time, and no judgment.
So what are the types of meditation you need to be aware of?
Types Of Meditation
Meditation is simply a relaxed way of healing your troubled and anxious mind as well as your body.
Even though they have a common goal, there are several meditations you can implement to get the best out of yourself.
They include:
1. Guided Meditation
Guided meditation, sometimes called visualization or guided imagery, requires mental images formation or regions, sites, situations, or venues you find relaxing.
It requires you to use as many senses as possible, such as sounds, textures, sights, and smells. You can choose to move the process along in your own time or through a qualified expert’s guidance.
2. Mantra Meditation
Unlike other meditation processes, mantra meditation requires you to silently and continuously repeat phrases or words to counter distractive thoughts.
3. Mindfulness Meditation
Just like the name, mindfulness meditation requires you to be mindful or aware and eventually accept your situation or problems in the current moment.
Mindfulness meditation helps to expand your day-day conscious awareness.
Similarly, it helps you concentrate on the meditation experience, like how you should breathe. It’s allowed to feel the presence of your emotions and thoughts but without judgment.
4. Qi Gong
Qi Gong meditation simply involves relaxation, breathing exercises, meditation, and physical movement to maintain and restore balance.
This meditation process is drawn from traditional Chinese medicine and is highly effective.
5. Tai Chi
Tai Chi is a fantastic Chinese meditation process that involves martial arts. It requires you to carry out different self-paced movements or positions in a graceful, slow manner while also effectuating a deep breathing process.
6. Transcendental Meditation
Transcendental meditation is a great, natural meditation technique.
It needs you to silently or quietly repeat an effective mantra like a word, a phrase, or sound but in a certain way. However, you have to assign yourself the mantra.
This meditation process relaxes your body by letting it settle and rest so that your mind can achieve inner peace without great effort used.
7. Yoga
Yoga is simply the implementation of different postures and a regulated breathing exercise to achieve body flexibility and a relaxed mind.
While moving and changing the poses and maintaining your balance and concentration, you give no room to think about the bad or busy day you had.
Why is Mindfulness Meditation Important?
1. Reduces Stress
Mindfulness meditation reduces stress levels of those who take it seriously as part of their healing process. It has effectively lived to its expectations as many people these days attribute their reduced stress to mindfulness meditation.
Generally, physical and mental stress leads to a dangerously high level of the stress hormone cortisol that often generates the detrimental effects of stress like the emancipation of inflammatory chemicals known as cytokines.
The above effects play havoc with your sleep, increase anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, and lead to cloudy thinking and fatigue.
A study conducted for eight weeks noted that the inflammatory response brought by stress was dealt with effectively by mindfulness meditation.
Moreover, considerable research and study have played a crucial role in detecting symptoms of conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, irritable bowel syndrome, and fibromyalgia.
2. Promotes Emotional Health
Some types of meditation, such as mindfulness meditation, are the sources of people’s positive outlook and improved self-image.
It was evident in a review of treatments availed to 3,500 adults that showed that mindfulness meditation played a massive role in the improvement of depression symptoms.
Likewise, a specific study also showed that those using meditation therapists recorded low depression symptoms compared to those who embraced control groups.
Similarly, another research was conducted that brought to light that troubled people who went through an entire mindfulness meditation process without skipping and eventually completed it had few negative thoughts compared to people who value control groups.
However, when you have inflammatory chemicals like cytokines that come about due to stress, there’s a high chance or possibility that your mood will be affected and will eventually cause depression.
However, depression and inflammatory chemicals will reduce immensely with a proper mindfulness meditation process.
3. Enhances Self-Awareness
A properly effectuated meditation process just like the 10 minute mindfulness meditation exercise will do nothing short of greatness to ensure growth, relaxation, and understanding yourself.
Mindfulness meditation works to simplify understanding yourself and is the most suitable way to relate with people around you.
It also makes you aware of thoughts that often lead to mind destruction and self-harm. The goal is to help you street your thoughts positively through good habits and awareness for effective mind patterns.
Other forms of meditation, such as Tai Chi, also encourage self-efficacy to express one’s belief to surface hard times and challenges.
A particular study showed that mindfulness meditation is highly effective as 153 adults who used its app for two weeks continuously, in the end, had reduced loneliness.
However, they had improved social contact, which is better than the controlled group. Similarly, it leads to problem-solving skills.
4. Lengthens Attention Span
A well-implemented meditation technique often lengthens your attention span. It simply improves the endurance and strength of your awareness and attention.
You only need to listen to a few mindfulness meditation tapes when doing a task to improve your attention and accuracy more than those in control groups.
A particular study showed that those who consistently implement meditation worked better on visual tasks and improved attention span than people who don’t value the power of meditation.
Similarly, a good meditation process often reverses brain patterns that highly contribute to worrying, poor attention, and mind-wandering. This helps to have a well-thinking mind.
However, the meditation process should not be for long hours but just a short time daily. A well-managed effective 5 – 10 minutes mindfulness meditation can go a long way to improving your attention span.
The 10 Minute Mindfulness Meditation Exercise
Five Senses Exercise
The main idea behind this five-sense practice is to pay attention to what you’re presently experiencing using your five primary senses.
You only need 5-10 minutes set on a timer, and you’re ready to go.
- Bring your attention to 5 things you can see: This needs you to focus on the things you can only see, but they have to be things you would overlook regularly.
- Bring your attention to 4 things you can feel: Focus on four significant experiences you’re feeling, such as your clothes texture, the chair you sat on, the sun’s warmth, etc.
- Bring your attention to 3 things you can hear: Pay attention and listen effectively and pick out something you can listen to in your vicinity. It may be the clock ticking, birds chirping or the wind blowing. Similarly, you can pay more attention to see if you can hear things further away, such as traffic sounds or children playing.
- Bring your attention to 2 things you can smell: Here, you’ll be required to take notice of the good or bad smell you used to take in or block out.
- Bring your attention to 1 thing you can taste: This will require you to apply the taste you’ve experienced at that particular time. You’ll then need to examine your mouth’s current taste and then take a bite or a sip of something or just open your mouth for air to come in, then focus on it.
Body Scan Exercise
Body scan exercise requires you to remain still, be relaxed, and primarily focus on a particular place in your body and determine how it feels.
Similarly, set a 5-10 minutes timer and compass.
- Lie on your back or sit on a comfortable chair: Shut your eyes and let your arms be in a relaxed position as your palms face up while your feet are somewhat distant.
- Bring your attention to your breathing: Breathe in and out and then take note of the rhythm or breathing pattern.
- Bring your attention to your body: How does your body feel? Focus on the clothes on your skin, your body temperature, the place you’re in, the way the floor feels under you.
- Bring your attention to the parts of your body: Rather than just your whole body, take notice of its features that are painful, feeling light or heavy, tingling or no sensation and enthusiasm.
Mindful Movement
Mindful movement is quite simple as you can implement it in almost every day-day exercise. “Even a walk can be done mindfully,” Addie Wootten said.
However, the focus should be based on the presently happening attention.
- Get up;
- Stretch, run, or walk;
- Pay attention to what’s around you and how your body and its parts feel;
- If you’re running outside, then what’s the weather like?
- How does outside smell like;
- But if you’re exercising on a mat, how does it feel?
How Do I Make Meditation My Priority?
Perhaps you’re super busy that setting aside some 10-15 minutes for meditation can seem to be a waste of time—until you realize that your brain needs stress-free time and relaxation.
After all, we take a significant amount of time looking good, taking care of our possessions and our physical health, but what about your mental health?
Why should our mental strength and capability be reduced, yet it solves almost 100 percent of our problems?
Why not meditate for a while and heal?
10 minutes mindfulness meditation is the answer as it involves the discipline allocation of a small portion of your time daily and engaging in a particular healing activity when faced with challenges.
It requires 10 minutes of your time daily to be physically and emotionally present and understand the phase you’re going through.
By regularly having quality time with your mind, you learn to be aware and attentive in certain life circumstances.
Note that regular mindfulness meditation is far better than once in a while meditation for long hours. Of course, you don’t just have to meditate for 10 minutes; that’s only a reasonable time frame that is agreeable to many busy people.
If you can do less than 10 minutes or more, it’s still applicable as long as you implement and have the discipline to be consistent daily.
How Do I Find the Right Meditation Technique For Myself?
Different meditation techniques and methods work differently for other people.
To some extent, some say that stabilizing meditation keeps their fears and pain away, while others feel that through storytelling used in analytic meditation, they can outgrow their problems and emotions.
In short, some find mindfulness meditation helpful, while some see sleeping meditation as the ultimate healing process. Either way, you’ll have dealt with the main problem—poor mental state.
So after knowing that all kinds of meditation are effective in their way, how do you then sharpen your meditation skills?
How to Sharpen Your Meditation Skills
Here are some procedures to sharpen your meditation skills:
- Breathe deeply: Breathing deeply is a compelling meditation skill that most meditation beginners can find very helpful due to its natural presence. You simply have to focus on your breathing skills but take the feeling seriously and listen to the inhale and exhale process that takes effect in your nostrils. Ensure as you breathe, you do so slowly and deeply, and when you lose focus, remember to turn back your emphasis to breathing quickly.
- Scan your body: When implementing this meditation technique, your body should be the focus point—specifically contrasting parts of your body. Similarly, you’ll need to be aware of aspects of your body and know whether it’s tension, pain, relaxation, or warmth. Note that breathing exercises should go hand in hand with body scanning while slowly imagining relaxation or heat in and out of contrasting parts of your body.
- Repeat a mantra: Come up with your mantra, whether secular or religious such as the Jesus prayer (Christianity), holy God’s name(Judaism), or Aum or Om famously used by Hindu(Buddhism or Hinduism).
- Walk and meditate: Walking is a healthy and efficient way of relaxing, and when combined with meditation, it’s powerful. It can be used while walking to a city sidewalk, tranquil forest, or mall. However, you’ll have to slow your walking pace and take each movement slowly and carefully as you meditate.
- Engage in prayer: Prayer is also an important technique used to meditate. It’s effective and shouldn’t be ignored. Whether written or spoken, prayer is a powerful tool you can implement. It doesn’t matter whether you use prayers written by others or by your own; as long as you pray, then you’re good to go.
- Read and reflect: Reading and reflecting can also be compelling, as many have reported success using this skill. You can quietly read sacred texts or poems and meditate as you reflect. Similarly, listening to spoken words, sacred music, or just any music you resonate with can inspire you through your meditation process. Whatever you reflect can be discussed by a religious leader, a friend, or written in a journal.
- Focus your love and gratitude: Here, you need to channel your effort on love and appreciation and incorporate them in your thoughts by doing away with negativity. It’s possible to simply close your eyes, gaze, or imagine as part of your meditation process.
Start Building Your Meditation Skills Today
By mentioning the meditation skills above doesn’t mean you ignore one that works; you can implement any that makes you comfortable as long as you can meditate through your problems.
However, note that it’s increasingly possible to lose focus during your meditation process and destroy all the good work you have done.
Through practical experiments, you’ll eventually settle for the meditation process that best suits you.
Do you want to level up from your 10 minute mindfulness meditation exercise? Check out our The 20 Minute Mindfulness Meditation Exercise
