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Meditation has many health benefits and is a highly effective way to relieve stress and maintain a healthier lifestyle. With practice, meditation becomes both more of an easy habit to maintain and more of an effective one as well, given that it builds resilience to stress over time. Putting in the effort to learn and practice meditation can actually transform your experience of stress in your life.

There are many different ways to meditate, and this technique is one of the most basic.

With practice, you can use this technique to feel inner peace whenever you need it.

How to Begin a Basic Meditation Practice
Step 1: Get into a comfortable position.
Many people like to sit in a comfortable chair while others prefer to sit cross-legged on the ground. You want to be able to completely relax while still staying awake.

Ensure that your posture is correct. It is easier to stay awake through long meditations if your back is straight. If you begin your meditation practice with this in mind, your body will become used to the position as you move on to longer periods of time.

Tip: Should you feel your shoulders slump while meditating, simply straighten back up. A straight back will also prevent soreness during longer meditations.

If you choose to sit in a chair, sit toward the front of the seat and place your feet firmly on the floor.

This will improve your posture and help you concentrate on your practice.
Step 2: Close your eyes gently.
When you are in a comfortable position, look into the distance with a soft gaze, then slowly lower your lids. Keep your jaw slack and slightly open as well. You want to relax all of your facial muscles.

Tip: Do not squeeze your eyes tight. If you feel your face tighten, slowly open your eyes, refocus on that soft gaze and lower them again.

At this stage, your goal is to relax every part of your body. If you feel some tension in certain parts of your body, take a deep breath and allow it to relax you.
Step 3: Clear your head.
This is the part of meditation that takes the most practice and it can cause the most frustration. Keeping your mind clear is the most important and most challenging aspect if the practice. Learning to do this during your meditation practice can help you to let things go in the rest of your life as well.

The idea is to stay unattached to thoughts of any kind. That means that, if the inner narrative voice in your mind speaks up, gently "shush" it and opt for internal silence.

Tip: Do not be discouraged if you cannot clear your thoughts completely. Our minds are constantly filled with thoughts and even the most experienced meditators must silence their inner voices. The goal is to recognize the thought then mentally tell it to go away (even if for just a second before the next one pops up).

Step 4: Keep Going!
That's it, really! Keep letting go of any thoughts that may pop into your mind.

The quiet spaces between thoughts will become longer and more frequent the longer you practice.

You're on the road of meditation!

A Few Tips to Help Your Meditation Practice

Give it time. Meditation takes practice and a lot of it.

If you're expecting to do it 'perfectly', you may actually create more stress than you relieve. There is no 'perfect' meditation session and if you go into it with an expectation of perfection, you may let yourself down and won't want to stick with it.

Start small and work up to longer sessions. Begin with a short session of 5 minutes. After you are comfortable, move to 10 or 15 minutes until you are comfortable meditating for 30-minute sessions.

With practice, this type of meditation becomes easier and more effective. You will come out of a meditation session feeling relaxed and refreshed, ready to face the rest of your day.

Track your time and set goals. It can be easy to lose track of time while meditating and two minutes can seem like an eternity when you are just beginning. This can cause you to worry and have thoughts like "Is my time up?" or "Have I meditated long enough?" Those thoughts defeat the purpose of clearing your mind.

To combat this, you may want to set a timer. Use an app on your phone and set it for the amount of time you want to meditate during that session. Be sure to use a gentle tone or set it to vibrate so it doesn't startle you when time is up, then turn off the screen and relax.

With practice, you may eventually find yourself saying "Wow, that was 10 minutes? I could go longer!" When you are comfortable, skip the timer and allow your meditations to last as long as needed.

Try another style of meditation if needed. If the experience is frustrating for you and you don't really want to continue, you may find more success with other types of meditation like the Karate Breathing Meditation.
Source:
Davidson, Richard, et. al. Alterations in Brain and Immune Function Produced by Mindfulness Meditation. Psychosomatic Medicine, 2003.

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How to Practice Basic Meditation and Relieve Stress in Just 30 Minutes

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Meditation has many health benefits and is a highly effective way to relieve stress and maintain a healthier lifestyle. With practice, meditation becomes both more of an easy habit to maintain and more of an effective one as well, given that it builds resilience to stress over time.

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Best Easy Yoga For Stress Relief  ♥ Unwind & Let Go | Koh Kood

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https://www.bohobeautiful.life https://www.patreon.com/bohobeautiful This stress relief yoga class is perfect for all levels. Through focusing on the breath work in each posture you will slowly start to feel tension melt away from you. Take it as slow as you need to, stay present in the moment, and allow yourself to let go of all that no longer serves you through each exhale you do.

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Activities to Create an Attitude of Gratitude

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Activities to Create an Attitude of Gratitude

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In the glittery bustle of the holidays, teachers often scramble to fit in last-minute lessons and refocus students dreaming of vacation excitement. It's worthwhile to pause in the middle of all that excitement to build in reflective moments of gratefulness.

Yet without a clear plan to foster classroom gratitude, we risk missing the improved attitude, improved physical and psychological health, and enhanced social and emotional skills that giving thanks can bring. Positive psychology suggests that learning to be thankful has benefits that extend far beyond the classroom walls, including lifelong happiness.

This year, I'm forgoing the shiny new pencils and sparkling bags of treats as student gifts. Instead, I'm opting for a few new classroom traditions that we can carry on long after the holiday sparkle has faded.

The Art of Letter Writing

Letter writing is an academic skill-requiring students to focus on a specific purpose and an authentic audience-but it's also a perfect opportunity to get students thinking about who and what they should be thankful for. And there's some solid evidence that letters of gratitude can improve happiness too. When University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman studied the impact of people writing and delivering one thank you letter a month, the letter-writing participants quickly demonstrated an increase in happiness scores.

While no gratitude routine is foolproof, a tradition of writing a weekly letter of gratitude is low-fuss and adaptable long past the holiday season. In my classroom, students pause each Friday to jot letters of thanks. Sometimes, we plan recipients of our gratitude letters together. One week, we might create a list of people who have positively contributed to our education or brainstorm about people who have cared for us in difficult times. Other times, students reflect independently on their lives and memories to find people to thank.

Although students eagerly select letter recipients each week, a little in-class coaching can improve students' gratefulness and their letter writing. I like to remind the middle schoolers in my classroom to consider the challenges their letter recipient might have overcome. Thanking a former teacher for great math lessons is an excellent start, but it's even better if a student can point out the extra strain of getting students to focus during the very last hour of the school day.

With just a pencil and paper, letter writing helps students create their own habits of gratefulness to carry on long after the holiday snow has melted.

Growth Journaling

Thanking others is important, but it's also essential to be grateful for our own life progress. This holiday season, I'm adding a contemplative tradition to our busy schedule. Growth journaling, where students write diary-like entries of reflection about their successes and improvements, pushes students to consider how they've changed and to reflect on the people who made their progress possible. Some studies suggest that writing about positive experiences-as one does in growth journaling- increases well-being by fostering a sense of gratitude.

With a little holiday music jingling in the background, students find a quiet place to curl up with a notebook and pen. Their writing focus might be tiny: Some students pick moments where they used the correct words to respond to frustration or took a deep breath instead of reacting in anger. Other students reflect more expansively on a year of major academic growth or the accomplishment of earning an award in sports.

Some days, students want to share a story of growth with the class, but other times their reflections are safely hidden behind journal covers. In the bustle of the holiday season, growth journaling adds a touch of calm and a tiny reminder that being grateful includes loving ourselves in the midst of progress.

Secret Acts of Kindness

While gift exchanges will always be popular, less tangible traditions of gifting and gratitude can be a welcome classroom change. In many classrooms, teachers encourage acts of kindness by directing kindness assignments themselves. One teacher I know assigns students special agent names. She delivers manila envelopes with secret kindness instructions to all of her agents. One instruction might tell a student to write an anonymous note of encouragement to a student struggling with math, while another agent could get instructions to do some extra cleaning to surprise the janitor. Students jump at the chance to get sneaky with their acts of kindness.

For a stress-free version of the kindness exchange, I have my students focus on noticing acts of kindness. Each time they see a particularly thoughtful or considerate action, they post a shout-out on a digital kindness wall. A link on a classroom website, a Google Classroom page, or even a simple Google Forms questionnaire that you occasionally share with the class will allow students to offer gratitude for a peer's kindness. The students are not thanked by name-for example, "Thanks to whoever organized the bookshelf, it looks great!" The notes serve as written high-fives and pats on the back to encourage kindness to be contagious.

Instead of worrying about classroom decorations or a memorable holiday party, I'm turning my focus to durable traditions of gratitude and thanks. This year, I'm trying to remember gratitude is a lasting gift that never wears out.

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Encouraging a Sense of Gratitude in Students

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In the glittery bustle of the holidays, teachers often scramble to fit in last-minute lessons and refocus students dreaming of vacation excitement. It's worthwhile to pause in the middle of all that excitement to build in reflective moments of gratefulness.