What results do you want from your meditation?
Four common reasons why people meditate are:
- You want better relationships with your family. Less stressful ones!
- You no longer want to be at the “mercy” of your thoughts
- You want to be better at identifying what’s important and then taking the right steps in response now you have that clarity.
- You need to sleep better and to wake up feeling refreshed.
You may have just one of these reasons in your head, or, like me, you may have a combination of them.
Better relationships with Mum, Dad, Hubby
One of the reasons that I started meditating was to improve my difficult relationships with my parents. I no longer wanted to be at the mercy of my thoughts!
Another reason was to improve the relationship I had with my hubby. I wanted to identify what was important and do the right thing so we could enjoy being together all of the time. I was in my early forties when all this was stuff was bouncing around in my head. I guess you could call it a mid-life crisis!
With meditation, you can start to get a handle on the relationships which are important to you and start working out you can improve them. Have a read of the Mindfulness Guide to Mum and Dad and Mindfulness delivers TLC for more information on how that worked in practice.
Don’t get put off worrying about this being uncomfortable. When you take it in baby steps any discomfort is minor and the ‘ah hah’ moments very much worth the time spent on it.
Have a read of the Mindfulness Guide to Mum and Dad and Mindfulness delivers TLC for more information on how that worked in practice.
Ask yourself if you want to change anything about how your relationships run? Would this be a good outcome to aim for with your meditation?
Reduce Stress!
Along with wanting easier relationships, I was also starting up a new business, my acupuncture clinic. I found out how true it was when starting any new venture and becoming self-employed, is very stressful! I made meditation part of my personal self-care at this time to help ease me through the initial stages of being my own boss.
As to your own circumstances:
- Is there a specific work or home situation, either happening now or coming up, which is causing you to feel stressed?
- Are there situations that crop up regularly?
- Is it likely to crop up again?
If you’d like to cope better (and sleep better). Or even avoid these situations re-occurring, then here alone, are excellent reasons to learn to meditate. Over time, meditation helps you see a clearer path.
Self-care is a great reason to meditate
Circumstances can arise that all but demand you put more time into caring for yourself. This could be because you’re ill or someone you are close to is ill or it’s because of death, divorce or redundancy. Whatever underlines the issues, there comes a time when you want to feel like yourself again. You crave stillness amongst the chaos.
Meditation is a gentle and effective self-care method to help you relax and calm down your mind. It’s also a really good way of winding yourself down to sleep more soundly. I found it really helpful in the run-up to Mum’s dementia diagnosis and afterwards.
Change your life for the better
If you’ve decided you want to use meditation, you’ve taken an effective step to change your life for the better. Meditation will teach you mindfulness – to be ‘mindful’ of your thoughts and feelings. The practice restores order to your mind by giving you the mental space to view the issues before you, calmly.
Meditation is not a ‘magic bullet’. It isn’t going to instantly solve all of your problems in your life. But it will enable you to come up with more ideas on how to get under, over, or around those things that are really affecting you.
Is meditation the guarantee of everlasting happiness? No, it’s not. But it will get you into a zone of feeling more peaceful and calmer for longer and longer periods of time, and that in itself is a really fabulous result.
Help and Support
If you need a bit of structured help when thinking about why you want to meditate, there is a free download that can help you obtain some clarity. The PDF can be downloaded here: Your Meditation Starter Kit. I’ve included some questions in there to trigger off some thought processes and help you draw some conclusions.
Please feel free to ask questions, by emailing me. I love to hear from and I’ll reply as soon as I can.
xx Annya
