Self-development & Therapies > WORKSHOPS > Meditation

Meditation

Learning to meditate, and finding one or more techniques that you are so comfortable with that you adopt the practice as part of your daily routine can:-

• Improve your quality of sleep

• Reduce your blood pressure

• Banish the symptoms of being over-stressed

• Help you handle your emotions

• Increase your self esteem

• Help you learn more easily

• Improve your mind and memory

Meditation is something we have all heard of, but few of us have actually tried it. This may be because it seems to demand total concentration, or to be a part of an eastern religious life, or simply because we cannot imagine ourselves able to achieve the complete inner stillness than we associate with the term meditation. And few of us know what the benefits are sufficiently well to decide whether meditation might be worth the time and trouble we suspect will be involved in learning how to practice it.

First, let me assure you that there are many different types of meditation, and some are so simple and so easy to learn that you will not realise you are actually meditating... until you start feeling rather better and calmer. In fact meditation is a little like an art form - take drawings. There are huge detailed drawings and simple unfinished ones, large ones, small ones,... but each has its own message and its own value and its own place. So too with meditation. And you may find, as I have, that you find that one method of meditating is very comfortable and easy for you to use regularly in your life, and that a couple of other ones are particularly helpful in certain situations.

So, the question remains - why should you consider meditation as something that could be helpful to you. The most obvious reason is to achieve a sense of inner calm. Even if you meditate only rarely, the sense of calm that you feel is cumulative and stays with you even in times of high tension. And of course if you do some sort of meditation more regularly, it will change the way you handle stress. This is helpful to anyone who worries, suffers from anxiety or depression. And a calm mind does have a knock on physical effect.

The link between a healthy body and a healthy mind should be obvious to us all, but we do not have to accept the holistic point of view on faith or good sense alone. There are countless studies being done to prove that meditation is helpful for people with chronic illness - from heart problems to eczema, and this has come about because the western medical establishment is coming to accept that attitude of mind is very important to health.

Certainly it has been well established that meditation can truly help your achievement in the workplace by sharpening your mental focus, enhancing your abilities to handle stress and change, and promoting both mental and physical health.

Normally a day workshop in small group 3-7