Meditation: Fruit for the Soul

Meditation simply means taking a break from your busy daily life, hectic job, worries and concerns. It means turning off your mobile phone, letting your computer and your e-mails wait for a minute and giving yourself some time. We are such an action-oriented society that it is extremely important to relax as we are becoming more aware of ourselves.

Meditation can show you where you are holding tension and teach you to find your center. This can dramatically improve your health and align your intentions, and l make you a creator of life instead of a recipient of whatever comes your way. If you cannot relax your body and mind, then you may have problems with health, finances, relationships or all three. Recent research has shown that meditating once a day for 10-15 minutes can reduce stress and bring calmness in life.
More and more doctors are prescribing meditation as a way to lower blood pressure, improve exercise performance in people with angina, help people with asthma breathe easier, relieve insomnia and generally relax the everyday stresses of life. Meditation is a safe and simple way to balance a person’s physical, emotional, and mental states. It is simple; but can benefit everybody.

Make meditation part of your daily life and nurture self-respect. With meditation, we give the attention a target that keeps us anchored in the present moment. The target can be a physical object, or more commonly, the breath. We give the mind something consistent to focus on and this becomes the object of the meditation, Here are three easy tips to get you started with meditation.
Choose a Place to Meditate
First of all, choose special place in your house. It can be a corner or a room or you can meditate outside in fresh air. If you like, you can furnish that area with special objects that have a spiritual meaning for you. But the important thing is that the place where you do meditation is quiet. There should not be any disturbance. Tell people around you that this is the place where you spend time with yourself, so that there is no one to interrupt your quietness.

To get better results, and enhance your meditation, you can consciously choose the pleasant fragrances that are relaxing, balancing and nourishing. You can use smells like lavender, juniper or geranium in your room. Oils like chamomile, vanilla, jasmine, mandarin and neroli have calming, grounding and cooling effects. You can choose to meditate in the lap of nature. For example you might have a place near a beach or in the woods where you can be quiet and undisturbed and really enjoy nature together with your meditation. Great experiences can be achieved when you meditate in nature.

Correct Position While You Meditate
The classic posture is to sit with legs folded and hands resting quietly in the lap or on your knees. But for an effective meditation, you need to find your own posture, the pose in which you feel comfortable and relaxing. If your pose is not comfortable enough the body will start aching and you won’t be able to concentrate and carry on with the meditation. On the other hand if the posture is too comfortable chances are that you will fall asleep. Thus, there is a strong need to look at the the balance between the two.
Work out which posture is best for you. You might choose to sit in a chair, with legs crossed or sit on the floor or walk around gently in a room. It is up to you, try a few different postures and see which one gives you best result.
Eyes - Open or Closed?
Whether to keep eyes open or close them is again a question of suitability. Some people say that one should close eyes while some others think that meditate with your eyes open. You do the way what gives you the best results. Generally people, who keep their eyes closed have great meditation. A few others fall asleep with eyes closed. 

So if you keep your eyes closed make sure that you sit in an alert position. The same goes for when you open your eyes to do your meditation, you may keep looking here and there. So it is all about concentrating, no matter whether your keep eyes open or closed.

I will discuss more tips in coming articles