In a previous article I talked about the importance of meditation. I learned to meditate two years ago after following a one week program where we would meditate for one hour at 6 am (in the mountains), before doing some chi gong and tai chi. It was an incredible experience and I learned a lot.

After that experience I continued to meditate quite often. I also tried visualization and it has really helped me to overcome difficult situations and diseases (stress, fear, anxiety).

Last month when I started my waking up at 5 am experiment I realized that I was missing meditation, indeed I realized that I was doing meditation or visualization only for a few times per week. Because I was already doing the waking up at 5 am experiment, I decided to wait until the experiment was over to remedy my lack. Now it’s time to fix.

Meditation: why

I’m sure most of you who have never tried meditation may think of it as something bizarre, or at least as a time waster. I used to think the same, until I tried.

I could spend a day talking about the benefits of meditation, but I’ll try to be very short. Note that there are many studies proving the benefits of meditation.

  • Mind. Thanks to meditation you can dramatically reduce stress and gain clarity. After that you’ll be able to overcome your fears and you’ll feel more secure of yourself. That can easily translate to well being.
  • Physical. Meditation is not just for your mind, but also for your body. By breathing slowly and deeply you’re allowing your body to detoxicate. I will talk more of the physical benefits in a future article.

One thing that’s important to say is that meditation has nothing to do with religion, so if you have heard that before, it was untrue.

Meditation: how

I’m definitely not a master of meditation, so I don’t feel as I can teach you how to do it, but there is plenty of information online if you want to get started.

In my case I will do 30 minutes per day of meditation, preferably in the early morning. When possible I’ll do it outside where it’s still chilly so there’s no danger of falling asleep or procrastinating.

I do have a few tracks for meditating but I’m not sure if I will use them or not, instead I will probably wear headphones to isolate from external noise.

Some days I will just do visualization. Visualization helped me to overcome fear, but it’s also useful in sport and success, and that’s what I’ll focus in.

Positive what?

The second part of this experiment will involve positive thinking. Starting from tomorrow I’ll wear the complaint free bracelet (thanks Dave for giving me one for free). This is basically a challenge to wear the bracelet in the same wrist for 21 days in a row; the problem is that every time you complain about something you have to switch wrist. That’s gonna be fun.

Conclusion

I’ll write some detailed article on meditation in the next weeks, along with (hopefully) some interesting results to share.

If you have particular questions about meditation and positive thinking you can ask them below in the comments, and I’ll try to answer to each of them, or I’ll refer to people more competent than me.

After this experiment is over it will be time to try something new and more uncommon. Stay tuned.