Which of These 5 Meditation Mistakes Are You Making?

Why not guarantee yourself a more chilled festive break with this handy post! Freaked out cooking ten courses for a bunch of ungrateful relatives? Worried people won’t get you big enough presents?

Fear not dear reader, dive in and I’ll share with you my top tips for fixing the 5 most common meditation mistakes.

Have you ever wondered how much of your meditation time you actually spend meditating? Or how much is actually completely wasted in getting ready to meditate?

Meditation Mistake #1: Physical Stress

One of the main reasons yoga goes hand in hand with meditation is that it’s a lot easier to focus on your ‘inner game’ when your body feels nice to be in. Getting quieter mentally often reveals where you’re out of balance physically, so you’re well served by making sure your mind has a nice body to live in!

Solution: take up a regular physical discipline alongside your meditation practices. Many people enjoy yoga or tai chi and one of the most efficient uses of your time is rebounding.

Meditation Mistake #2: Environmental Stress

Noise, funny smells, untidy space or simply a lack of guaranteed privacy can really interrupt your session. Whilst with practice you can meditate anywhere, it’s a lot more useful at first to establish a meditation zone that you can keep coming back to.

With regular use you also establish a mental trigger that fires each time you go there, helping you get back in the zone quicker and easier with each session.

Solution: Find or make a clear, quiet space where you can practice consistently.

Meditation Mistake #3: Unfinished Business

Having lots of things ‘undone’ floating around in the back of your mind can really put you off. It’s like running too many programs on your computer at once.

Solution: Start shutting mental windows by making a list of all unfinished business and allocate a couple of evenings to finally getting it off your plate once and for all. Ahhh, that’s better!

Meditation Mistake #4: Mind Chatter

If your conscious mind is chattering away like a drunken monkey, it’s hard to concentrate on your meditation. Any practice however that involves using your internal dialogue rather than fighting against it will be more successful. After all, your mind runs like that by design.

Solution: Try mantra meditation processes, as made famous by the TM movement. Pick a sound or word that resonates with you and chant it on long, slow, sonorous out breaths. Then let your voice fade and switch over to mentally repeating the sound.

Meditation Mistake #5 Energetic Stress

Your body has a sensitive network of energetic fields that can be strengthened or scrambled by the environment you live in, making it harder or easier to meditate deeply.

Prolonged stress triggers the energetic side of your fight and flight mechanism, which the ancient Chinese called Triple Warmer, which can drain energy from the rest of your energy field. Obviously this is useful in emergencies but over time it can scramble the rest of your system.

Solution: Try this simple drill – rest your fingertips on your temples for one long, deep breath. Then as you breathe in, smooth the fingers along the sides of your head, up over the top of your ears and down to where your neck meets your shoulders.

Hold there as your breath out then in again, then as you exhale, smooth down the top side of each arm in turn, flicking energy off your fingertips. Do one side then the other.

You might find this drill makes you yawn or shiver slightly as you discharge the stress response.