Worry and anxiety are pretty much the new normal for a lot of people around the world. Whether you’re a teenager and still in school, or an adult working too hard, you’ve probably experienced the mind-bending worries that fill up your life.
Concentration? Living the moment? No way.
After all, it’s hard to relax and ground yourself when your thought and worries are successfully filling you with dread.
And even if you want to, living in the moment, understanding that moment, and accepting it, well, all of that can be difficult and challenging. Sometimes, it’s even terrifying to think about it, let alone do it.
And yet, it’s important. Mindfulness is important!
This blog will tell you about a mindfulness technique that will help you live a life with less stress, and it’s called ‘Breathing Meditation’.
Of course, before we begin, I’m sure you have a few questions, so let’s answer them all one by one.
What is Mindfulness?
In dictionary terms, mindfulness is described as being aware of something in the present moment without being attached to it.
However, in simpler words, you can see it as acknowledging and accepting yourself and everything around you without letting it overwhelm you. In fact, it’s considered a therapeutic technique to help you calm down and ground you.
Why is Mindfulness important?
- It helps regulate your emotions
- Decreases stress, anxiety, depression, etc.
- It helps focus your attention and make better decisions.
- It helps you understand your thoughts and the world around you without judgment
- It helps you become more grounded and present in your life
What is Breathing Meditation?
Breathing meditation, also known as mindful breathing, is a powerful meditation technique that is easily defined as focusing your full attention on breathing. From the way it follows its natural rhythm and flow to the way you inhale, exhale, inhale again…
You concentrate entirely on your breathing and leave the world behind, along with your worldly worries, pain, and stress.
The attention on your breathing acts as an anchor. It pulls you back to the present moment from the thousands of problems you’ve concocted in your mind and all the regrets that you feel guilty for.
How can you practice Breathing Meditation?
There are three easy steps to practicing this technique. All you need is a quiet room away from distractions.
Step #1: Sit up straight, with your spine upright.
Step #2: Exhale all the air out of your lungs.
Step #3: Inhale through your nose until your lungs are filled.
Once you have done this, continue to repeat, repeat, and repeat, until you find yourself calm and in the now, present in time, and no longer worried.
There are other forms of breathing meditation as well, and choosing one depends on what is recommended for you. These include sitting, kneeling, standing, lying, and seven-point meditation postures.
Benefits of Breathing Meditation
Breathing meditation is a mindfulness technique, and therefore, follows upon its advantages to the average person. Still, when we dig deeper into the benefits of breathing meditation specifically, we come across a few more uses that you should know about.
1. Improved Focus
The world is a collection of millions of distractions. With advanced technology, billions of people, and improved communication in the modern world, the distractions become that much more aggravating. And, well, distracting.
Of course, that means everyone’s living the busiest life ever, and who has time to relax and focus when everything is moving past a mile a minute?
You keep thinking that you’ll miss something or lose something, and that’s why you try to move with the pace of the world while ignoring your speed.
On the other hand, by practicing the correct breathing for meditation, you learn to stop and focus. Focus, in return, will help you use your mind to its maximum capacity, rather than waste brainpower worrying over things you can’t control.
2. Improved Ability to Relax
Incorporating breathing exercises into daily life can bring a significant change into your emotional and mental state because fixating on your breathing technique and letting every other worry flow away helps you relax, breathe in, and breathe out.
3. Improved Self-Awareness
By setting aside time to practice breathing meditation, you also set aside time to think about yourself without judging. You tend to learn your strengths and weaknesses and look at yourself through a new perspective, objective and free of self-hatred or self-obsession.
That’s not all – you also notice your physical self. After all, when you focus on your breathing, you pay attention to how your body reacts to your thoughts and how you physically represent your existence.
4. Improved Self-Control
Since breathing meditation allows you to take a step back and look at your life in a detached and objective way, you learn how to control your feelings and emotions.
You don’t want to let the stress and the worry consume you and eat away at you, right?
So, you start working on self-control and learn to navigate your emotions. You consciously put in the effort to maintain a state of calm, which leads to emotional and mental stability.
5. Body health benefits
Not only does breathing meditation provide all the emotional benefits listed above, but it also helps improve the health of your physical body through the following:
- It lowers heart rate
- It lowers blood pressure
- It helps reduce stress
- It helps manage chronic pain
- It helps regulate reaction to stress and pain
- It helps reduce the possibility of burnout
Conclusion
In the end, you can see that there are many benefits to using Breathing Meditation as a mindfulness technique.
Whether you’re currently embroiled in the hectic life of the modern human or just want a bit of time to yourself and your mind, this technique will serve you well.
Like all practices, this may come hard at first. But as long as you continue repeating and anchoring yourself to the present, you will learn how to relax more and ground yourself.
You will learn to accept yourself!
There is much more information about breathing meditation that can supplement knowledge, so if you’re interested in learning more, reach out to either the EOC Institute or the New York Times.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
