Simple Ways To Meditate Include Concentration On Breathing

The point of meditation is to make our mind quiet and at peace. It helps to stop all the stray thoughts which pass though our minds for a while and give it some rest. Ideally practicing simple ways to meditate should enable us to quiet our minds even in times when we are not meditating. It is not a simple thing to switch the mind off, but meditating helps a great deal.

One of the easiest meditation techniques to accomplish is to focus on the breathing. If you have ever taken any guided meditation lessons or listened to tapes or CD's of this type of session, they generally always start with the words "take a deep breath'. The reason for this is a deep breath will help you relax. Meditation has to take place when you are relaxed, so the more deep breaths you take, hopefully the more relaxed you will be.

Deep breathing is useful for relaxation even if you are not about to start meditating. We have all heard the words "take a breather", so taking a few deep breaths before any situation helps to calm you.

Simple meditation methods where breathing is the focal point, entails making use of the breath to release anxiety, worry or problems. A good exercise is to inhale through either the mouth or nose and when you exhale, imaging you are exhaling out of the tips of your fingers or soles of the feet. At the same time as you visualize this, also visualize that all toxins, worries and anxiety are being released with the exhalation.

Training your breath to be the focus of your attention can be accomplished by shallow and controlled breathing, Imagine at the same time that there is a feather on your chin or nose and you are not supposed to disturb it. The more focus you have on your breath, the more easily you will be able to find a meditative state.

You need to take whatever time you can out of your day and practice these breathing exercises whenever you have to opportunity. There are no fixed rules, do it when you go to bed at night or when you wake in the morning or both. Whatever makes you feel better!

5 New Sleep Commands To Trick Your Body Into Falling Asleep While You Keep Your Mind Awake

A while back I had been up all night working on something. Around noon I was very tired and decided to lay down for a few moments. As I lay there I began to feel a very uncomfortable urge to roll over. For no real reason I decided to ignore it and just lay there. To my extreme surprise I felt the paralysis wave roll over me and put me in full sleep paralysis.

The paralysis was completely unexpected. I had always thought it was something you had to be very deeply relaxed to achieve. Instead I was actually fairly tense and my mind was not at all in any kind of meditative state.

I'd accidentally found something that I had never seen in any books on lucid dreaming. The roll over signal itself was all you need to enter paralysis. I spent the next several months experimenting with different variations of what I'd done. I began looking for other ways to command the body into sleep and here's what I found.

The Two Types Of Sleep Commands

It turns out sleep commands come in two types: sleep starters and sleep triggers.

1.) Sleep Starters

Sleep starters are what you use to get the body to start thinking that maybe it's time to fall asleep. For instance, using stop drop and roll is a sleep starter because it makes your body ask for permission to fall asleep by artificially creating the roll signal.

2.) Sleep Triggers

Sleep triggers are how you then tell it "Yes: fall asleep right now". SDR has an implicit sleep trigger: when you simply ignore the roll over signal the body interprets it a trigger to enter sleep paralysis.

5 New Sleep Commands

In this section we'll cover sleep breathing and stopped eye micromovements, which are sleep starters. Then we'll cover three sleep triggers. The first is pause breaths, the second is muscle twitching and third is eye movements.

3 Ways To Learn The Sleep Breathing Sleep Starter

Sleep breathing is simply mimicking your body's breathing pattern when it's asleep. If you act closely enough like you're already asleep then your body thinks that it really is asleep, even if your mind is completely awake and not even slightly relaxed.

There are 3 basic ways to find out what your personal sleep breathing is like.

1.) Sleep Paralysis Perspective

First, when you enter waking sleep paralysis a lot of times your perspective shifts slightly away from the center of your head and in to your sinuses. It sounds like you're breathing in a cavern and you'll find your body automatically breathes with quite a lot more force than you do when you're awake. The breathing is much deeper and longer. Pay attention to how this sounds in order to learn your sleep breathing pattern.

2.) Watch Waking Breathing

The second way to learn your sleep breathing pattern is to practice staying perfectly still when you wake up in the morning. You can continue to breathe the same way you did when asleep if you wake up gradually.

3.) Record Sleep Breathing

The third way, which is the best, is to record yourself sleeping. For $30 you can get a digital voice recorder that can record the entire night. You can then use free software like Audacity to find the parts of the recording that have your sleep breathing.

Here is a recording I made of myself. It sounds a little creepy, but that's just how it sounds in a cheap recorder.

Once you have your recording you can listen to it right before you go to sleep in order to make sure you're on the right breathing rhythm. If you don't want to record yourself, you can download a free mp3 of my breathing pattern in the O.B.E Quickstart at www.Lucidology.com.

3 Sleep Breathing Gotchas

When you use sleep breathing there are a 3 gotchas to be aware of: These are the learning curve, blackout breathing, and the narcotic breathing effect.

1.) Sleep Breathing Learning Curve

The learning curve means that it takes practice and if you don't have the rhythm right it can prolong the time it takes to fall asleep. It's best to practice using sleep breathing for a couple nights before using it during an early morning O.B.E induction. However once you have the rhythm right, sleep breathing is probably the single most powerful of all the sleep commands.

A while back I laid down in the afternoon and just starting doing sleep breathing. I didn't use any other methods at all and within 15 minutes I entered waking sleep paralysis. I could roll over and completely wreck the paralysis and then bring it back again with just 3 or 4 sleep breaths.

I usually don't have that amount of control with sleep breathing, however it does show the potential power it has when you get the rhythm right.

2.) Blackout Breathing

The second gotcha is blackout breathing. A lot of times when you use sleep breathing for the first few minutes it seems like it's not working and you feel like you should give up. But then all of a sudden you black out and you're in a dream or you're waking up the next morning. The blackout breathing effect is very real so if you use sleep breathing for WILDs make sure you have a timer because otherwise there's a very good chance you'll send yourself so far into sleep so quickly that you'll never become lucid without a beep.

3.) Narcotic Breathing

The third gotcha is narcotic breathing. Sometimes instead of blacking out all at once you get a relaxing feeling. It feels like when you first wake up in the morning and the last thing you want to do is get up out of bed. You just want to go back to sleep. This is very useful in destroying insomnia. When you get the narcotic breathing effect it feels really good to lay there and breathe and you'll have no desire to get up. Narcotic breathing is a signal that it's working and you'll be asleep very soon.

Second Sleep Starter: Stop Eye Micromovements

That wraps it up for sleep breathing. The second sleep starter is to stop eye micromovements.

During the day the eyes are searching for changes in motion. Because of this they make tiny micro movements all the time and at the end of they day they are still making these micro movements even though you may want to go to sleep.

If you close your eyes and try to keep them still you'll find that after about 30 seconds they are still twitching very slightly. It's not easy to totally relax the eyes. However if you can keep them at complete ease for several minutes the body will interpret that as a signal that the mind may have fallen asleep. In fact if you keep your eyes still your body will often fall asleep even if the rest of your muscles are fairly tense.

Roll Eyes To Relax Them

Before sleep, relax your eye muscles by rolling them around in wide circles in both directions several times and then letting them rest. After 3 or 4 nights of practicing this you'll be able to keep your eyes totally still and you'll fall asleep much faster.

This brings us to sleep triggers which are used to convert partial paralysis into full paralysis.

First Sleep Trigger: Pause Breaths

The first trigger is pause breaths. When you reach 90% paralysis, the reason the body doesn't go to full paralysis is it has a bit of doubt about just how asleep the mind really is. This is because of muscle tension. The best solution is to relax more deeply but sometimes that's not possible.

What you can do is exhale and pause for 2 or 3 seconds. Relax as much as you can and then begin breathing again like normal. By relaxing your breathing you reduce your overall tension just barely enough to send a signal to complete the paralysis. During those 2 or 3 seconds you'll feel the paralysis deepening. Sometimes you may have to use 2 or 3 pause breaths about 15 seconds apart. When you do this, you're not trying to alter your blood oxygen levels or anything like that. The purpose is to simply lower your overall muscle tension just long enough to paralyze completely.

Second Sleep Trigger: Muscle Twitching

The second sleep trigger is muscle twitching which was actually the first sleep trigger I ever found. I reached partial paralysis and on a whim decided to try twitching my right forearm to see what happened. To my surprise my entire arm paralyzed. I then twitched my right calf and my right leg paralyzed. I gradually paralyzed my entire body that way and completed the separation.

In other words muscle twitching only paralyses the surrounding muscles. I've actually found that I could paralyze just a single finger by twitching it when in partial paralysis.

How To Do Muscle Twitching

To do this twitch once every second or two when you're in about 95% paralysis. The twitch is very gentle and only lasts the smallest fraction of a second. If you twitch your forearm the rest of your arm should not move at all. If you twitch too hard you'll wreck the paralysis so keep it very light.

Probably the reason this works is when you dream you try to move your muscles but sleep paralysis prevents you from moving. However you do move your muscles just a bit when dreaming which causes muscle twitching. This means the body associates muscle twitching with deep sleep so one way to mimic deep sleep is to use muscle twitching.

Third Sleep Trigger: Up And Down Eye Micromovements

The third sleep trigger is up and down eye movements. With your eyes closed you simply move your eyes up and down as fast as you can for about 10 seconds. I've never been able to get it to work using left and right movements. However there is actually a type of hypnotic psychotherapy called "eye movement desensitization and reprocessing" or EMDR which uses side to side eye movements. You may try experimenting with side to side movement to complete partial paralysis but I find up and down is a safer bet.

The Order To Use Triggers

So which trigger do you use? The most reliable strategy is to start with a few pause breaths which is usually all it takes to get to 100% paralysis. If that doesn't work use arm twitching. If that doesn't work use up and down eye movements. If that doesn't work just relax for a few more minutes before using the triggers again.

When To Use Sleep Triggers

I've experimented using sleep triggers to go directly from awake to asleep but that doesn't seem to work. I find that for up and down eye movements to work you need to be in about 99% paralysis, muscle twitching works at about 95% paralysis and pause breaths work at about 90% paralysis. So it's best to start out using sleep starters and then switch to triggers for the last step.

How Can Meditation & Yoga Help Your Business?

Running an Online Business requires one to maintain a certain strength of character.

The technical skills and techniques needed are easily learned, but it's your mindset and strength of character that will bring you great success and set you apart from your competitors.

How do you stay inspired, balanced, focused, enthusiastic and energised every single day? How do you maintain your clarity, dedication and industriousness on a day to day basis? What about maintaining a daily state of positivity and happiness and of belief, certainty and faith?

There are so, so, so many techniques out there to help achieve this state of personal peak performance. I've tried a heap of them! Personal development programs, books, courses, affirmations, programming, courses, visualisations, and more courses!

Of all these techniques, I have found the most beneficial to be regular, daily meditation. Meditation combined with a short period of inner reflection or character building.

Scientific studies into the practice of meditation, have shown incredible results in brain activity, brain synchrony and neurohormone levels. The results in neurohormones is the most noticeable effect I have felt.

Planetary Peace Meditation has shown increases in neurohormones, serum serotonin and plasma melatonin of up to 300%. This is my preferred choice of meditation.

In layman's terms, this means that I feel much happier after meditation! I am more centred and have much more clarity about what I am doing. I feel more relaxed and more positive about the day ahead, my business and life in general. My emotions are more stable and balanced, so I can see things clearly, rather than being clouded by my emotions.

I'm also able to deal with obstacles, which might otherwise put me behind schedule or put me in a negative mental place...as I have extra energy to handle them, and the added clarity to see them accurately and work them out practically.

So, do you think this has an effect on your Online Business and internet marketing? You bet it does! If you're familiar with the Law of Attraction, have read books by Abraham-Hicks or watched 'The Secret', you'll know what I mean.

If we are feeling good, and our Energy level is high, we attract what we want towards us. If your business requires new prospects hungry to buy into your business...then that's what you will get...a constant stream of new hungry prospects AND profit!

Its a smart idea to use the time immediately after mediation when you're feeling great, to do things for your business. Make a video, write an article, update your blog, write your adcopy, etc. Whatever you do will be infused with the good energy you generated during meditation. This in turn, will be picked up on by your prospects and will make them more receptive to you and your business.

For me, I prefer to meditate first thing in the morning after a shower. It's the perfect set-up for the day ahead. But any time during the day or evening is fine too. All you need is half an hour.

I go continue on and on about the benefits of meditation, but this would take us beyond the scope of this article.

Meditation And Yoga for Treating Anxiety

Although anxiety can be present in various levels of severity, it is none the less a serious condition with which millions of people are faced with each and every day of their lives. While for some people anxiety may be little more than a nuisance, for others it can be extremely debilitating as these people are forced to live with the threat of frequent panic attacks. Irrespective of how slight or how severe your anxiety level is, it's vital that you seek proper treatment.

The most common treatments for anxiety include prescription medication and therapy/counseling. However, there are those that profess a different, holistic approach to treating anxiety. This approach entails engaging in meditation therapy and it has been known to provide excellent results for even those that deal with incredibly high levels of anxiety.

The public may have a preset idea of this type of therapy. Meditation may sound a little off the wall and the value may be questioned. Truthfully, meditation can be quite a valuable process for those who want to reduce anxiety because it calms the mind. Ridding the mind of the excess 'noise' that keeps it an constant state of anxiety is achieved by this calming process.

Basic meditation can be performed seated, walking, or moving. Usually, when one meditates the main first step is to completely empty the mind of all thoughts. This is achieved by completely removing oneself from any clear imaging of events, thoughts, people, etc from the mind. One can simply meditate with a clear mind or one could meditate on something in particular. One common strategy would be to meditate on a Zen koan.

This is a stylistic approach to a question that has no answer. A Zen Koan is used to develop the skills needed to search one's own intrinsic character. This may seem somewhat daunting but in actuality it is simple. By allowing the mind to calm down and remove much of the 'noise' that is consistently present the anxiety is allowed to fade away.

Familiarizing yourself with the basics of mediation is by no means difficult. In fact, the internet offers a wealth of free resources concerning the subject. By following their detailed tips you can at least gain a rudimentary understanding of what is needed to get the most out of a meditation therapy session.

Of course, there will be those that may have more than a few reservations about meditating by themselves. Some individuals are not fans of such solitary pursuits and would prefer a little company. If this is how you feel, signing up for Yoga classes could solve this problem. Yoga integrates meditation into its sessions and that allows the mind to achieve the much needed calming effect to reduce stress, anxiety, panic, and depression.

Practicing yoga in your home is also recommended when you are not in class. This is helpful to achieve a habit of solitary meditation. Alleviating your anxiety will be accomplished. This is not a new concept. Meditation has been a method of relieving anxiety for many thousands of years. Why has it been used for so many years? Because it works. This is the reason that meditation should be tried by those who have anxiety problems.

Meditation has been practiced for thousands of years. This alone is proof of it's effectiveness for releaving anxiety. You have nothing to lose so give it a try.