Meditation

[maianixon]

so i started trying to meditate in order to deal with my anxiety and i was just wondering if anyone has any meditation techniques/ videos / links / resources they could share with me?

im quite new to this and usually just put 'meditation for anxiety' in youtube lol and its perfectly fine but im curious to hear other suggestions too

[MyNameIsTerry]

I put some free resources together for Mindfulness a while back. I keep meaning to update it with more:

http://www.nomorepanic.co.uk/showthread.php?t=168689

Some of those are MBCT/MBSR courses (one is a free MBSR online course) which come with books usually. But you could have a look and see what you think without having to pay out.

Yeah, there is tons out there. Basic meditations, different disciplines, ones that build on top of each other, etc. It can be a bit confusing.

The most popular these days is Mindfulness which was brought to the US by Jon Kabat-Zinn decades ago after his research in Buddhism. It doesn't include any of the spiritual side of Buddhism, which is a lot larger and far more complex. Zinn creatd MBSR to give people a course to work through. Later, Professor Mark Williams co created MBCT which is similar but more connected to CBT. MBCT has NICE evidence approval for certain conditions to show it works. MBSR has more evidence out ther as it's being around longer. But you don't need to do either of these structured programmes to meditate in Mindfulness. They are useful though because they start with a foundation and walk you through more exercises to build on your skills.

Prior to this form, Trancendental Meditation (TM) was the big popular one. This fell out of fashion as their was some infighting. You might remember the Hollywood celeb types raving about meditation in the 80/90's? That was this stuff. TM is much deeper because it's larger than the section taken out of Buddhism for Mindfulness.

Mindfulness is the one with all the proof behind it though from what I've seen. TM never seemed to get very far with that. It's probably that TM was before meditation was becoming more popular in mental health?

There is also Compassion Meditation. This one is also good as it looks more towards inward compassion & forgiveness. Mindfulness looks more towards being in the present and observing your thoughts & feelings and interacting better with things. CM has some links in my thread too but I've not looked at it much (there are books about).

[maianixon]

Thanks
Mindfullness is one of the things i've tried out the most, the Body scan meditation (im pretty sure thats from mindfullness?) is what I've found most helpful so far, but I'm eager to try out more

[ankietyjoe]

By far the simplest and most straightforward is Vipassana, and more specifically breathing meditation.

There's no real secret to it other than doing it regularly and non judgementally.

One of my favourite resources is Mingyur Rinpoche on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/user/MingyurRinpoche/videos

My preference for guided meditation is without music, distractions reverb and wishy washy spiritualism. I do believe there is (non religious) spiritual experiences to be had with meditation, but it's a personal thing and not really to be guided by somebody else.

Another good guided meditation I found was this one (he actually does a couple)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozvF...mEkZ7GthuU94Dd

I'm a couple of years into my meditation journey and (admittedly) a bit of a vocal advocate on these forums, but it genuinely transformed the way I deal with anxiety now.

As I said before, the only real secret to meditation is just doing it. It might be good one day, not so good the other, but that's not the point. The point is you're doing it and all that time your brain is being rewired to not react. That is the point of meditation.

[MyNameIsTerry]

Thanks
Mindfullness is one of the things i've tried out the most, the Body scan meditation (im pretty sure thats from mindfullness?) is what I've found most helpful so far, but I'm eager to try out more

No problem. It gets discussed a fair bit on here so I put that thread together to save retyping the same things.

Body scan is one of the downloads found in various sections in that thread. It is a Mindfulness one.

You tend to start with breathing meditation (Mindfulness of breath) as a foundation to build on when performing the others. Courses like MBCT/MBSR tend to start this way and build up over the weeks with body scanning, movement, eating, etc.

But there is certainly a lot out there to try.

Vipassana is where Mindfulness came from.

My therapist started me on this when I was having CBT. It took a while a I was in a bad way. I was very symptom focussed, especially breathing, so starting with a meditation that asked you to focus on your breathing was not easy. However, in mine concentration on breathing was only an induction whereby you use 3 forms of monitorng your breathing movements (including some visualisation) and then you move onto he observation of thoughts period. If I struggled to maintain observation, re-applying the inductions helped pull my focus away so I could restart the observation.

If you want a flavour of the eating meditation, I've copied the script from Mark Williams book into that thread somewhere (Raisin meditation).

It really helped me with my intrusive thoughts. I had been on meds for a while before I started this and my CBT wasn't getting very far. Two months into Mindfulness and I started seeing results and wanted to work on my CBT again despite having finished by then. So, I started achieving the things I had hit a brick wall with in therapy. Six months of study and I felt a Cognitive Shift towards compassion, it was very clear to me when it happened. I also had a few "aha" moments with it where I just relaxed into things and moved forward even more.

[horzen]

Yeah, meditation it is very useful thing

[AashiAggarwal]

Meditation for anxiety techniques can neutralize the effects of anger, frustration, and aggression. Daily meditation will help to minimize the stress level. Meditation can improve symptoms of distress and mood of the affected person(Urban Buddha) .

[lesliehanson]

Meditation really helped me. That is very useful thing!

[beingheretherapy]

My 2 current methods:

1) Concentrate on the breath and your body grounding yourself in reality/the present.
2) Try to energize your body through the practice so you end it with more energy.

[SallyJohnson]

My absolute best type of meditation is lying down in a hot bath, closing my eyes and deep breathing. Not even joking