In today’s busy world, many of us have extremely busy lives.

You might find yourself always rushing around or on the go, never with a calm moment. Although most of the time this rush is unavoidable, it’s still essential that we find some way to calm down our minds.

One way we can do this is through practicing mindfulness, such as meditating.

It’s extremely important to develop habits that leave you feeling calm, refreshed, and give you mental clarity. This will help bring you to a new quality of live.

Why it’s important to practice mindfulness

It’s usually the norm for each of us to have something stressing us out everyday.

Most of the times it’s things you can’t usually control, like school, your job, your relationships, or anything else.

However, this everyday stress being the norm causes a lot of build up of stress inside your body.

Over time, your body becomes used to this constant stress and starts believing that this is it’s natural state. Leaving you feeling stressed out, even when you should be relaxing.

When this happens, your body begins to constantly be in a stressed out, fight or flight stage.

The fight or flight stage is what your body goes into to keep you alive, when there’s true danger to your life.

However, when it’s constantly in this stage with only percieved danger, but no real threat, this has a huge impact on our health and lives.

Not only does this stress tremendously decreases the quality of our everyday lives, leaving us feeling overwhelmed, irritable, and exhausted.

Eventually this constant stress can become dangerous, especially in terms of your long term health.

This is why it’s so important to find ways to relieve your stress. Things like practicing mindfulness strategies.

How to actually start meditating

If you’re a beginner and have never meditated before, you’re in the right place.

Meditation can seem complicated and maybe even impossible, but with these tips, hopefully it makes the practice more clear to you.

I’ve just recently started my meditation journey and I put together some tips that I think would be beneficial for you to know as a beginner.

Really, it’s not as complicated as it seems, it just requires you to be invested for the long term.

Here’s everything you need to know to start meditating:

The need for dedication and commitment

If you want to start practicing meditation, two things you need are dedication and commitment.

Meditation is something that takes time and practice to master. You need to be able to commit to setting aside a certain portion of everyday to practice.

It doesn’t need to be a big portion, right now I’m only doing 10 minutes a day, you just need to commit to consistently finding a time to do it.

If you don’t commit to practicing often and for a long time, you’ll never start seeing the benefits of meditation.

Think of it this way, you wouldn’t go to the gym only once a week and expect to see tremendous weight loss.

No, because in order to see the changes in your body you need to invest more time, more often than just one time a week.

Realistically, you’d probably go to the gym at least 3-5 days a week. The same goes for meditation.

Additionally, you need to be dedicated enough to make this a long term habit.

How to learn to meditate and make it more enjoyable

Find a comfortable spot

Before you actually begin meditating, you want to be in a spot where you feel comfortable and can focus.

You want not only your body to feel comfortable, but also your mind.

I think when most people picture meditation, they picture someone sitting with their legs crossed and back straight on a yoga matt.

Although this is certainly a great position to meditate in, it’s not something you need to do. Especially if it wouldn’t make you feel comfortable.

The goal here is to feel comfortable, so try and pick someplace you feel comfortable in often.

Maybe something like your bed, a comfy chair, or the couch.

I like to try and pick a spot where I feel most relaxed and comforted internally. For me, this is usually the spot I choose to relax in everyday at the end of a long, stressful day.

The main tip here is to try and choose a spot that brings you the most comfort, physically and mentally.

Understand the importance of breathing

Breathing is a crucial element of meditation. Not just breathing, but rather controlling your breathing.

It’s going to be important for you to slow your breathing down. This is what will help calm your body and put you into in relaxed state.

When doing this, there are two things you should become familiar with: deep breathing and the sensation of the breath.

Deep breathing

The best way to start doing this is to practice taking deep inhales and long exhales.

To help you with this, you could use a breathing technique to help you take long, consistent steps. One technique is to count during each step of the breathing process.

For example, try something like counting 4 seconds in, 2 second hold, and 4 seconds out. This will help you get into a good breathing pace.

Controlling your breathing is one of the main elements of any mindfulness practice, so it’s important to learn some ways to do that.

The sensation of the breath

Additionally, you’re also going to want to become familiar with the sensation of each breath.

Follow the breath through your entire inhale, then you’re entire exhale. Everything you feel during this full breath is known as the sensation of the breath.

You’ll learn how to feel the breath entering through the tip of your nose, filling deeply and fully into your lungs, then exhaling again on the tip of your nose.

This will help you become much more grounded and still.

Be kind to yourself, even if your mind wanders

Especially when you first start out, there are going to be times when your mind wanders.

Since we all have busy lives, it’s understandable for your mind to continue racing. Even when you’re trying to calm it down.

Especially for those who are already in a constant state of stress. It’s become a habit for your mind to always be thinking.

Your mind is always trying to plan, think about what’s next, what you should be doing now, what happened, what’s going to happen, etc., etc. All to keep you safe.

Although we can’t control this happening, we can control how we choose to respond to it during the practice.

It’s important that when your mind wanders, you choose to respond to it with kindness.

Give your thoughts and your mind a gentle reminder that yes, these thoughts are important, but they’re not important right now. They aren’t needed right in this moment.

Right now you’re safe and you can think about all that other stuff later.

Don’t put pressure on yourself

Going along with responding kindly to yourself when you loose focus, it’s also important to not put too much pressure on yourself.

Meaning pressure to always have a “perfect session”. Because really there’s no such a thing.

For example, don’t go into the practice with the belief that you need to stay focused the entire time.

Don’t convince yourself that you can’t have a single wandering thought, or else the session won’t be worthwhile. Because this isn’t true in the slightest.

Along with learning how to meditate is learning how to control certain thoughts when they arise. To be able to separate your thoughts and your emotions from your reality.

Essentially, every time your mind wanders and you bring it back, you’re strengthening this skill and becoming much more mindful.

Additionally, don’t put pressure on yourself everyday to have a perfect session. Allow yourself to have sessions when your mind is racing and you just can’t calm it down. This is completely okay.

Allow your sessions to look different everyday and don’t put the “perfect” label on anything. Because it’s not about being perfect, it’s about making progress.

Be patient with your progress, don’t expect it to be linear

Meditation is a long term practice that requires just that, practice!

Especially when you’re first getting started, it’s going to seem impossible to ever be able to calm your mind.

Try not to feel discouraged though, this is normal.

It will take a long time to develop the skills to control your thoughts during a session. And to gently turn them down when they arise.

Being aware of this will allow you to be much more patient with yourself and not feel like you’re doing something wrong.

Additionally, once you get deeper into the practice and start becoming more skilled, you’ll start seeing results in show up in your daily life.

You’ll notice yourself feeling more calm, more patient, and maybe not responding to a thought or emotion as soon as it arrives.

However, once you start seeing this progress, it’s normal to get to a point and feel like you’ve gone backwards.

This is because meditation progress isn’t linear.

You might feel extremely calm and patient one day, but the next you’re back to racing thoughts and aggravation.

Don’t worry though, you might not see it, but with the ups and downs there will be an upward trend.

Maybe next time you’ll have two days of patient and one day of racing thoughts. Then the next four days of patient before having one day of aggravation.

Just continue to stay patient and consistent. The results will show.

Follow along with guided meditations

One of the best tips that’s helped me start meditating is by following along with other guided meditations.

In these, there will be someone walking you through the practice, telling you exactly what to do and when to do it.

This is a great way to start learning especially if you’re starting from ground zero like I was. Guided meditations can help you develop the essential skills you need to practice meditating on your own.

The guided meditations I use I find on the app calm.com. I personally love this app because it gives me a new, 10 minute, guided meditation every single day.

However, if you don’t have this app, you can certainly find some on YouTube, Spotify, or other apps.

What you can do now

Now that you’ve learned all these tips to start meditating, you just need to start!

Staying consistent will be the hardest part but over time meditation will become on of you’re daily habits.

Remember to stick with it, be patient and kind to yourself, and eventually you’ll start seeing the results!

More posts on women’s health:

Here’s how to start thinking more positively to improve your life

Journaling: the key to becoming more mindful

How to enjoy the present moment, stop living in the past and enjoy the present