You don’t meditate to get better at meditation, you meditate to get better at life.

Meditation is a practice . It can be used on it’s own to help us focus, quiet our minds, gain clarity, feel more grounded and calm. Science is showing us that meditating for as little as 5 minutes a day can have profound effects on our brains and our mental health. It can be as simple as that!

Meditation can also be used as part of a bigger practice of mindfulness. (more on mindfulness below!)

We can use meditation as a tool. It is like going to the gym. We go to the gym to work our muscles so that our bodies can be stronger and healthier outside the gym. We meditate to train our minds the same way we train our bodies.

We meditate so it’s easier to be mindful, so mindfulness becomes our default setting instead of being on auto-pilot. When we are on auto-pilot we miss out on so much of our lives…. and we only have this one life, why would we want to miss it?!

We practice so it becomes a way of moving through life with more ease and more joy, less stress, less overwhelm.

We practice to get better at life!

Neuroscience is now starting to show us through scientific research that meditation can have therapeutic effects on our mental health, which is pretty amazingI think!

There are lots of ways to meditate and I encourage you to explore them and find the one that works for you. The type of mediation that I practice and teach is called Insight Meditation (named because of the insight it gives us into our own minds, thoughts and emotions). It is also referred to as Mindfulness Meditation.

In Insight Meditation we use specific practices like:

• concentration meditation-becoming aware of our breath and training our attention to stay there.

• mindfulness meditation-cultivating mindfulness (or awareness) of our body, our emotions and our thoughts.

• loving kindness meditation- this is how we learn how to cultivate the compassion that is so important in a mindfulness practice.

I know we throw the word mindfulness around a lot these days which is why I actually think it is SO important to know what it really means… and know the steps to take to actually learn how to use it as a tool.

Mindfulness is paying attention on purpose, to the present moment.

It’s 4 simple steps:

• Remembering- this is where our meditation practice comes in… it helps us remember that we want to be mindful in the first place. We learn actual tools to help us do this through a simple mediation practice.

• Pause-once we remember we want to be mindful; we pause, take a breath and come into our body. Pausing helps us create a space of calm and quiet that we can pay attention in.

• Pay Attention-we use our senses to become aware of what is happening in and around us; we notice the sensations in our body, emotions and thoughts that are present.

• Bring in Compassion- this is the MOST IMPORTANT and often times hardest step. We learn how to let go of the judgments we bring to what we become aware of in this space and instead we bring in compassion.

These steps are simple but they are not always easy. Often times when we really become mindful, we start to become aware of the things that have created the stress or overwhelm or pain that we are feeling. BUT when we have the right tools to work with them, we learn how to let them go so we have more space for the things we want; energy, focus, creativity, ease, joy…. we get to choose what we fill that space up with. We get to live the life we want. Mindfulness is what happens when we learn how to truly pay attention to life!