Meditation ?

Today's meditation is a very ambiguous activity. You will find hundreds of instructions/articles/advisors/schools teaching activities they like to call 'meditation'. A lot of them express different, often contradictory statements and it is tough at first to distinguish dupery from wisdom. Generally there is a major difference between meditation and techniques leading to meditation. One could be the master of all breathing techniques, mantras, yoga, different focus methods but never experience meditation itself.
My advice is: pick up a meditation technique that suits you for your self improvement. Your mind will try and successfully interrupt your meditations, but don't mind that. After a while you may want to try out other meditation techniques to broaden your self-improvement meditation toolkit. After a longer while you will no longer need any of those meditation techniques to actually meditate.

After a longer while you will realise you will never ever meditate if you do that in order to improve your 'self'. That's where you may or may not get a glimpse of meditation and that's where I stop spoiling the fun. Find your own way.

Good luck

 

What type of self improvement are you looking for? Are you looking to be more mindful and present at work? Are you dealing with anger issues? Give me a bit more detail and hopefully I can point you in the right direction

 

Meditation is very helpful when recovering from Porn addiction, check this awesome and informative post here : http://www.nofap.com/forum/index.ph...to-rewire-yourself-faster-believe-this.43643/

You can watch on YouTube guided meditation and if is your first time meditating start with just breathing meditation , which is basically sitting down in a comfortable position with your back straight but not tense and then start to feel your breathing and try to follow all the breathing process and try also to avoid thinking in other things but the breathing process.

 

@Floops I would suggest you would need a mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is bringing your awareness to your breathing and the environment around you. This will help you in keeping calm during periods of anxiety. It also helps you challenge your thoughts which can bring on anxious feelings when in pressure situations.

You can search online for a good one or you can try this one: good luck

 

I recently read a comprehensive and completely secular book that introduces to the subject called "Waking Up" by Sam Harris.
He does a great job cutting trough the crap with a bit of humor and also explains the neuroscience on the topic at the same time. He also talks about mediation on his blog and in you tube videos.

It's really a great skill to learn and surprisingly challenging.
I've done a bit of meditation my whole life but after a bad break up in January this year I found myself meditating daily to keep my sanity, and since then I've completed 125 sessions ranging from 5 min-20 min! 5 min in the morning is completely doable and still a great intro!

Honest observation: It's always on days I'm "too busy" to meditate that I relapse.
:-/

Some advice:
Keep a journal of your practice for dedication and to record insights, there will be lots.
The journal also allows you to experiment with what works for you.
Counting breaths is a great intro practice to better focus your mind, then drop to just the sensation of breathing.
Noticing how hard it is for you to clear your mind is an indication of progress not failure.

 

I am a big fan of the famous meditator John Kabat Zinn, he co-founded meditation healing clinics all over the world and has a PhD from MIT so he is no quack. His awesome audiotapes are all over youtube but this one might be my favorite https://soundcloud.com/liel-1/day-6-jon-kabat-zinn-mindscape

 

I am a big fan of mindfulness meditation. Recently I have been focusing on two things when I meditate.

The first is focusing on the breath.
The second which I have recently started is focusing on keeping the body completely still.

I have found introducing the second has 'improved' my practice somehow. At least it feels like it has some effect. A 'still body, still mind' kind of thing.

On the point of confidence around girls I think of it more as being able to be relaxed around girls. I'm not always confident but I can be relaxed in my un-confidence. I've found I've been getting much better reactions from girls from this. Maybe I come across as more authentic?