What are some fun mindfulness activities and mindfulness grounding techniques that you can use to start your day?
Mindfulness exercises for focus can help us to reset our perspective at the beginning of the day. A few good morning mindfulness exercises can make all the difference in how we see our world throughout the day.
The best mindfulness exercises will help to promote a general sense of calm and contentedness. If you are slowly tapering off of a medication, and your nervous system is under strain, a few quiet minutes in the morning are a good way to begin.
One way to engage in mindfulness meditation consistently is to use a smartphone app designed to provide guided meditation exercises, such as the guided body scan. Yet, you do not need an app, a teacher, or a spiritual tradition to get started. So, what does a simple morning practice look like?
Positive morning meditation is often best started off with a 5 minute gratitude meditation.
Visual meditation simply means visualizing objects, people, or settings with your mind’s eye. You close your eyes and imagine, in as much detail as possible, whatever it is that you are attempting to visualize.
With gratitude meditation, you can first determine something for which you are intensely grateful in your life. Then, you breathe deeply, close your eyes, and visualize the object of your gratitude.
For example, I am intensely grateful for quitting a particular job many years ago. It may seem like a strange thing to be grateful for, but it fills me with inner peace to visualize where I was at that moment and how I felt after hanging up the phone. While there may have been some anxiety over what was to come in the future, there was a sense of an incredible weight being lifted off of me.
The sense of freedom that comes from that visualization always fills me with gratitude. Even relatively late in life, I realized the direction that my life must take, and I awakened to something painful that must be avoided, going forward. Of course, there are many things I am grateful for, including my health, people in my life, having a home, and a career that allows me to care for my family.
When we use a visualization like this to shift the mental models of our world, we are able to develop new insights into where we must be in life to experience fulfillment. Maybe we will not get there in a day, a month, or even in a year or two, but we can start to take small steps each day.
What is the one-minute sound meditation?
Beyond gratitude meditation and visual meditation, my other favorite is auditory awareness. I first learned about this simple, yet highly effective mindfulness exercise from work addiction expert, Bryan Robinson, in our podcast conversation.
Dr. Robinson explained how an excellent start to practicing mindful meditation was to focus on a sound in the environment. It could be the sounds of birds, a machine noise, the distant sounds of traffic, or the sound of flowing water, if you happen to be near a babbling brook.
While focusing on the breath is a popular technique, I prefer to focus on a sound. I live near a busy highway, and there is a never-ending low rumbling sound of traffic.
The key to this practice is simply to focus on the sound and the quality of the sound. You must put down your phone and be free of any distractions, for at least a minute.
Sitting in a particular posture is not required, and a quiet walk in a safe place works too. However, you should not drive and meditate.
Close your eyes and listen carefully.
As you listen, thoughts may enter your mind, but you still continue to focus on the sound, allowing the thoughts to dissipate. Remember that thoughts are simply a function of your brain generating content, which is an ongoing function of a working brain.
We rely on our brains to always be thinking and calculating, preparing us for what might happen in the near future. Brains are effective organs that protect us from a dangerous environment, just like a turtle’s shell protects the turtle from attack.
However, much of the content generated by our brains is based in irrational fear. Much of what we fear might happen to us is not likely to happen at all. There is no harm in taking a break for a minute or two from the endless stream of thoughts that our brains produce.
You do not have to make an effort to fight the thoughts off. I sometimes like to imagine my thoughts traveling along a road in my head, and as I start to meditate, I imagine them scattering in all directions. Meditation is not sleep, but hovering just above a sleep state can be thought of as a meditative state.
Focus on a sound, close your eyes, and allow the thoughts to pass through without engaging with them. Your thoughts will still be there for you when you are finished.
How can heart centered meditation help?
Another podcast guest whom I thoroughly enjoyed meeting teaches open heart meditation, which involves focusing on the heart as a center of love and warmth, rather than just a pump to push blood through our circulatory system. Of course, the job of bringing nutrients and oxygen to every cell in our body is a job that should not be minimized.
Practicing open heart meditation, or heart centered meditation, involves focusing on the heart chakra and visualizing energy coming in to cleanse feelings of anxiety and stress from our minds and bodies. To be clear, the heart chakra is a spiritual idea, and you will not find it in an anatomy textbook. Still, if you are interested in heart focused meditations, there are guided audio programs that will walk you through them.
What is Reiki guided meditation?
Many people believe in a universal life force energy, which practitioners of Reiki might refer to as the Reiki Universal Life Energy. The belief is that there is a loving, intelligent energy force filling the universe that can be tapped into for emotional and physical healing.
Reiki is often described as a form of healing from a distance. The distance might be a few inches, as the practitioner holds their hands just over your body. Or, the Reiki master might offer a session over a video Zoom call, or through pre-recorded sessions in a smartphone app.
To be clear, Reiki has not been clearly shown to treat any medical condition, at any distance. Reiki is not a medical therapy. It is a belief that some people find meaningful.
Some people have even described this universal mind as a multidimensional being, of which all of our awarenesses are a part. You might think of it as each life that experiences consciousness is like a finger puppet on the same giant universal hand as every other consciousness in the universe.
Still, being mindful of a loving, peaceful universe may help to put you at ease. When you are able to enter into a mindset in the morning that there is nothing to fear, you may get through your day with less of the usual anxiety.
Are new age spiritual meditation-related concepts scientifically sound?
At this point, if you are a science-focused person, you may start to question the validity of concepts such as chakras, universal mind, universal consciousness, and Reiki healing from a distance. While focusing the mind on gratitude and relaxation makes perfect sense as a way to calm the brain and body, the new age Eastern philosophies might not sit well with you.
However, our mental models of our world and universe can be helpful to us, regardless of scientific proof. In fact, science and spirituality are separate fields altogether. No one walks into a church, demanding that the church members provide proof of their beliefs.
Spiritual beliefs that improve our experience of life do not require scientific inquiry. They are also not a substitute for medical care.
So, there is no need to believe in universal mind power or any other new age beliefs, but if you find these concepts helpful, you may enjoy exploring them further. If you do not, you can take the technique and leave the rest.
Does meditation really work?
First of all, there is no silver bullet for physical dependence, for addiction, or for the fear that comes with withdrawal. Marketers for rehabs, online treatment programs, and phone apps would have you believe otherwise. Meditation is not a magical cure.
Keep in mind that physical dependence is not addiction. If you are slowly tapering off of a benzodiazepine, such as Xanax (alprazolam) or Klonopin (clonazepam), your nervous system has adapted to a medication that a doctor prescribed. It needs time and a gradual taper, guided by your doctor.
Sitting quietly is not going to make withdrawal symptoms just go away, and it is not a replacement for your medication. A few calm mornings are also not a reason to skip doses or to rush the taper.
Whatever you do, do not stop a benzodiazepine suddenly. The FDA warns that stopping abruptly, or reducing the dose too quickly, can cause withdrawal reactions, including seizures, which can be life-threatening. A taper must be gradual, and it should be planned with your doctor.
If you have a seizure or any other medical emergency, call 911. If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Yet, meditation is one modest tool, and it is worth having. Writing is another. Putting on paper how you are feeling, which symptoms came and went, and what you are grateful for is a form of mindfulness, and it gives you a better perspective of what is going on in your own head.
There is more about the everyday habits that help in the article on support during benzo tapering. Everyone is different, so what works for one person may not work as well for another.
Trying out various forms of mindful meditation will help you to find what works for you.
As you explore the world of meditation practices, you will find what works and does not work for you. For example, you may do very well with a particular smartphone app for meditation because you like the voice of the meditation guide. In fact, it may not even be important what your meditation guide says.
Whether they use gratitude meditation, or refer to chakras, spiritual energy, or other concepts, you may find that the combination of music, sounds, and the voice of your guide are helpful to get you into a peaceful state of meditation. It does not have to be difficult or complicated.
If you find that one meditation program is not working for you, try something else. Generally, gratitude practices are helpful for just about everyone.
Gratitude is an excellent practice that can help anyone to improve their mindset and outlook on life.
Yet, how you implement your practice of gratitude may differ from how others practice gratitude meditation. You may choose to keep a daily list of what you are grateful for in life. Or, you may choose to simply close your eyes, breathe deeply, and focus on one thing for which you are most grateful.
How you choose to practice daily meditations is up to you. Also, you may find it useful to read spiritual texts about meditation practices.
Do not allow yourself to become discouraged with meditation.
Most importantly, do not allow yourself to become discouraged if mindful meditation exercises do not seem to be working for you. If you sit quietly for a minute, five minutes, or ten minutes of meditation, and you feel like nothing happened, it does not mean that you wasted that time.
Meditation does not mean having a mind-blowing spiritual experience. It turns out, meditation is sort of like playing piano. No one expects you to start out performing a Rachmaninoff concerto at Carnegie Hall right away, and you do not ever have to get close to that level of mastery to benefit.
It is important to be able to take short breaks from life, away from your phone, your computer, and the tasks of daily life. You have the right to sit quietly for a few minutes, several times daily, to quiet your mind and live in a moment of peacefulness.
Mindful meditation is simply the practice of quieting the mind and experiencing the present moment. As you learn more about what works best for you, you will get even more out of the practice. I recommend starting with a basic 2 minute mindfulness meditation every single morning.
This article is educational. It is not medical advice, and reading it does not create a doctor-patient relationship. Decisions about starting, continuing, or tapering any medication should be made with your own physician.
