How do YOU Meditate?

I've been using HeadSapce and found it helpful. Also Youtube has an abundance of materials that focus on breathing exercises. To regain my focus, I imagine my chest as a balloon. If i lose focus, it starts to deflate so I have to focus on the balloon to help me inflate again.

 

When in Rome do as the Romans, when Meditating . . . just meditate.

 

I will to practice

 

Screw videos and audio if you actually intend to meditate.

Guided meditation and sitting meditation are two entirely different things. You cannot substitute or replace actual sitting meditation with listening to a guided meditation track.

For sitting meditation, the guidelines I give people when teaching them to meditate:

1. Take note of what time it is.
2. Sit comfortably. Position really isn't important, so initially I don't suggest worrying too much about it. Choose a position you could sit comfortably in for at least 20 minutes. If you feel like sitting in the lotus or half lotus positions, kneeling, or some other position - as long as you can maintain that position, that works - but if you can't maintain such a position, then just cross your legs normally, or even sit in a chair.
3. Eyes can be open or closed, it is entirely up to you. With eyes closed, it is slightly easier to relax and you're less likely to be distracted by external things. With eyes open, you're less likely to get too relaxed and drift off into sleep. If you don't struggle to relax, and don't find yourself falling asleep mid meditation, then it really doesn't matter which you pick. Go with what feels right for you, and you don't even have to pick one way and stick to it. I sometimes meditate with eyes open, and sometimes with eyes closed.
4. Turn your attention to your breath. Watch it rise and fall. In an out. Don't try to control it, but if you find yourself controlling it, that's okay, just keep it nice and relaxed, and watch it come and go.
5. Any time you find your attention moving elsewhere, whether to external sounds, objects in your room, or most often: getting caught up in thought - then simply turn your attention back to your breath.
6. Don't stress if you find yourself constantly being distracted and losing focus. What is important is that every time this happens, you notice it and return your attention to your breath as quickly as possible. This continued effort to keep your attention on your breath is what meditation is about. Even if every few seconds you get distracted and have to keep bringing your attention back to your breath, this is okay, as long as you do so, you are meditating correctly.
7. Your first time meditating, just try to meditate for as long as you can. See if you can make it a full 20-30 minutes, but don't get discouraged if you find yourself stopping after 5 or 10.
8. After you finish, look at the time and work out how long you meditated for. Try to increase the length of your meditation sessions over time, until you're doing at least 15-20 minutes every single day, if not more.
9. If you find yourself constantly wondering how long you've been meditating, then try setting an alarm, before you meditate, to go off after 20 minutes. This way you can avoid being distracted by thoughts about the time, because you know the alarm will let you know when it your time is up.
10. Consistency is key. Meditating for even just 5-10 minutes every day, is far better than meditating for a long time once every week or two. The benefits of meditation come with continued practice over weeks, months, and years.

 

It might be. I've experimented with different times and I usually find the best time is just the one I can be most consistent with - because I'm guilty of at times getting lazy with my meditation, and so whichever method results in me meditating every day consistently is going to be the best.

I tend to prefer night time meditation because it has the most effect on my dreams and I'm a lucid dreamer, but if the afternoon works out to be the best mix of: free time, and feeling alert enough not to start dreaming, then that sounds like the best time for you.

 

https://www.actualized.org/articles/guided-meditation

 

Long post incoming, hope I'm not hijacking the thread! If you have any further questions about lucid dreaming feel free to PM me, as I run a YouTube channel teaching about the subject

A lucid dream is a dream in which you are aware that you are dreaming. A lucid dream doesn't necessarily have to involve any level of control over the dream - you can be aware that you're dreaming without control, and that still counts as a lucid dream. Typically however in a lucid dream you are also able to control your actions, and, if you understand how: control the dream itself. This means anything from changing the location, to spawning and controlling characters, to creating items, using super-powers, etc.

Essentially since your subconscious creates your dreams, you are able to do more or less anything in a lucid dream so long as you can convince yourself that you can. If you've ever watched the Matrix, it's very much like what Neo can do when in the Matrix. If he believes/knows he can do something, he can. It's like that in a lucid dream. If you believe you can fly for example, you can.

Lucid dreams typically feel very real. You can interact with the world with all five senses. If you touch a brick wall, it feels like you're touching a real brick wall. Since you can't feel your body back in bed, only your dream body, it's like a fully immersive virtual world. Initially it can feel as real as the real world - and I think one of the first things that happens when you lucid dream is you start to realise how little your own perception can be trusted. After all, most of us operate on a principle of "if I can see it, touch it, taste it, etc it's real" - yet in a lucid dream you can do all these things in a world that is completely unreal and only exists inside your mind.

After some time familiarising yourself with the dream state you'll start to see the "holes" in it. You'll notice differences between the dream state and waking life that are obvious signs that you're dreaming (which in turn will help you become lucid more often). For example, nothing is static in the dream world. If you look at an object, look away, and look back, 9 times out of 10 the object will be different in some way, or might not even be there any more. This is because your brain is constantly creating the world through your perception, and so anything that leaves your perception and re-enters it must be recreated, and often ends up being completely different.

For this reason, another thing you'll notice is it's very difficult to read in a dream. Often you'll look at text, and there won't even be any real letters, just weird symbols your brain has come up with that mean nothing to you. Or, if you do see letters, sometimes they'll be jumbled up, not even making real words. If you get real words, they'll often be in an order that makes no sense. When you get sentences that do make sense, it's very rare that you get more than one such sentence in a row that does, so for example one might make sense, then the next might just be gibberish. Then to top all of that off, due to the non-static nature of the dream, the text can be changing as you read it. So something like reading a book is basically impossible in a lucid dream, because the chances of that much text being legible in one sequence are astronomically low.

Another one you'll notice is how robotic the other characters occupying your dreams are. These characters, just like the rest of the dream, are a product of your subconscious, and you'll quickly find that what you think and feel during the dream, affects how all the characters act. On top of this, just like text in books, the conversations with them can be meaningless and nonsensical, and they can behave really weirdly. Like bad AI in a video game, forgetting their lines, acting strangely etc, behaving so stereo-typically that it feels like they're reading a script. At times they'll behave more realistic, but any prolonged interaction with a dream character usually leaves you with a feeling like you've been interacting with an AI or robot, and quickly clues you in to the fact that you're not in waking life.

Despite the differences with the real world, and the limitations placed on you (like not being able to read, or the short duration of most lucid dreams), they offer tremendous potential and value.

Here are just a few things you can do in a lucid dream:

1. Ask your subconscious mind questions. Your subconscious normally cannot be talked to directly. You can probe your subconscious for answers using things like Rorschach blots, looking at art, and using allegory and symbolism etc, but you can never ask it a straight up question, because it thinks symbolically, rather than in plain English like your conscious mind. Since a lucid dream is produced by your subconscious mind though, you can literally speak to a dream character and ask them questions you have for your subconscious, and get real plain English answers. I've used this tactic numerous times to get guidance and inspiration/creative ideas.
2. Get inspiration. You can do this in the manner I described above, but there are tons of other ways to get inspiration. You can just go along with a dream and see what happens and take something away from it, or you can strategically put together a dream that will help you with something. A popular method is doing something like the following: Let's say you're an artist and need inspiration for a painting. You could transport yourself to an art gallery, and imagine that when you enter it, this is a future art gallery with only paintings your future self has made displayed in it. When you enter, you'll of course see lots of interesting artwork, and then when you wake up, you can try to duplicate some of the art you saw.
3. Have fun. Perhaps the most obvious reason for lucid dreaming is to have fun. You can fly around the world like superman. Travel to the moon. Fight hordes of zombies like a virtual reality FPS inside your head. Have awesome dream sex (note: I don't suggest this on NoFap, imo dream sex is just another form of masturbation, since the people you interact with in your dreams are just parts of your subconscious and not real people). Play around with abilities to shape the world, things like making buildings grow and shrink, or making a mountain rise up out of the Earth. The entirety of your dream world is like your own personal sandbox inside your mind, and you can't get hurt (if you die in a lucid dream, you just wake up, start a fresh dream, or even sometimes just respawn in the current dream), and nothing that happens in there is permanent, so the next time you enter a dream you get to start over afresh.
4. Practice skills. Studies have found that practising skills in a lucid dream actually results in real performance improvements just like if you were practising in the real world. https://www.researchgate.net/public..._comparison_with_physical_and_mental_practice - This is likely because the same neurons fire off. What's interesting is that since lucid dreams typically occur during REM sleep, where your body is paralysed in a process known as REM atonia, when you do something like say running in a lucid dream, the exact same neurons fire in the exact same manner as if you were running for real. The only reason you don't get up and start running out of bed is due to that paralysis I just mentioned. So what this means is you can practice physical skills. I for example used lucid dreaming to help me learn to do my first pull up. I wasn't strong enough to do one in the real world, but since in a lucid dream your beliefs govern how the world works, I was capable of doing an unlimited number in a lucid dream. So I used it to help me get the right movement pattern down before I could practice it for real in the real world.

I initially used lucid dreaming purely for #3, since after all, as a teenager when I discovered it, that's all I could think: How much fun I could have. Nowadays I mostly use it for #1, occasionally for #2 and #4, and only rarely for #3.

You spend 1/3 of your life asleep, for most of us that is a deep unconscious sleep. By learning to lucid dream, you're regaining some years of your life, becoming conscious, and utilising time that was otherwise wasted. Lucid dreaming doesn't interfere with your rest/sleep, in fact you typically feel more refreshed on nights when you have lucid dreams. So it's unlocking a bunch of extra time each night. Time to practice skills and get better. Time to have fun and relax if your schedule is too busy to do so in the day. Time to meditate. etc.

It's a fantastic discipline to learn.

 

thanks for tips!

 

This might help it's an active meditation
Instructions:

1. Sit on the heels in Rock Pose, knees together.
2. Stretch the arms over the head with elbows straight, until the arms hug the sides of the head.
3. Interlace all the fingers except the index fingers. Men cross the right thumb over the left. Women cross the left thumb over the right.
4. The spine stays still and straight.
5. Remain firmly seated on the heels throughout.
6. Eyes closed gently looking between the eyebrows.
7. Begin to say out loud "Sat"
8. As you pull the navel in and squeeze the muscles from the buttocks and sex organs. as if to stop yourself from going to the bathroom
9. Then say "Naam" as you relax. "Sat Naam" with a constant rhythm
10. Continue in this steady rhythm
11. The breath regulates itself
12. Start with 3 minutes work up to 11 or even 31 minutes.

To End:

1. Inhale and squeeze the muscles from the buttocks and sex organs.
2. Hold it briefly as you concentrate on the area just above the top of the head.
3. Exhale completely.
4. Inhale, exhale totally and hold the breath out as you apply a firm squeeze on the muscles from the buttocks and sex organs.
5. Hold the breath out for 5 to 20 seconds according to your comfort and capacity.
6. Inhale and relax.

 

I've used an app called Calm for guided practice.