The Power of Guided Meditation
I’m sure you’ve heard about mediation and how beneficial it is. It’s defined by Merriam-Webster as engaging in mental exercise (such as concentration on one’s breathing or repetition of a mantra) for the purpose of reaching a heightened level of spiritual awareness.
People who meditate on a regular basis report all types of physical and emotional benefits like less stress, less anxiety, less pain, better sleep, better concentration and lower blood pressure.
I recommend meditation and visualization to my coaching clients. Both approaches are researched and proven to have lasting benefits for better health, improved wellbeing, increased joy, and more success and fulfillment.
Visualization can be thought of as a mental rehearsal and has been used by professional athletes, Olympic athletes, business leaders, therapists, actors and others with great success. Basically, your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what you’re imagining, especially true if your visualization is vivid, and you’re really feeling the emotions and energy of that experience.
And if you practice visualizing a certain event with a positive outcome, when it comes time to actually perform you’ll feel like you’ve already ‘been there, done that’ – leading to great results. For example, say you get nervous public speaking and you have a presentation coming up where you’ll be speaking to 25 people.
You want to be successful and really get your message across so that your audience understands it clearly and benefits from it. Visualization daily or twice a day leading up to the event can help. You can visualize this upcoming event as if it’s real, see the audience, see their expressions, feel the energy of the room, feel your emotions before, during and after – and picture yourself killing it (in a good way) and how that feels. Hearing the applause at the end, people coming up to you afterwards energized and wanting to thank you. The more vivid and feeling it as really happening – the better the results.
So, what is guided meditation, and why is it so powerful?
Guided meditation combines mediation with visualization to bring about positive personal changes. During a guided meditation you achieve that deep state of relaxation and what you’re guided to visualize is very vivid and realistic.
Benefits are immediate and you’ll feel better on all levels: physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Guided meditations can be tailored to achieve specific outcomes depending on what your needs are. I used guided meditation frequently with coaching clients, with great results. I highly recommend you experience it for yourself.
“The mind is everything. What you think you become.” – Buddha
Photo by Brian Mann on Unsplash