How to Mediate to Get the Peace of Mind You Deserve?

Modern life in this day and age is hectic and overwhelming. Each one of us undergoes a lot of stress and towards the end of the day fatigue and the feeling of being over-worked hits us hard. Meditation is a way out of a stressful life ridden with fatigue that makes us lethargic, impatient, and frustrated. Did you know that meditation could help you stay focused and calm during a stressful situation? All you need is a 10 to 15-minute break from your daily routine for meditation. 

Learn how to transform your body and mind through meditation in this easy to understand short guide to meditation. 

A Beginner’s Guide to Meditation

How does one learn to meditate? The answer is pretty simple, we learn to meditate by controlling and focusing on our breathing. Concentration on your breathing is the first step towards your long journey to a perfect meditation session. Learning to pay attention to your breathing as you inhale and exhale translates to learning how to return to or remain in the current moment. Heres how to start meditating as a beginner.

Step 1: Find a Calm, Quiet Place 

Look for a spot in your home or your favorite park that’s calm, quiet and it should make you feel at ease and relaxed. Choose an isolated spot in the park that’s away from the hustle and bustle of the park. If you’re home or at the office make sure there’s no external noise to disturb you.  

Step 2: Be Comfortably Seated

Find a comfortable seating position; you can sit on the floor with a yoga mat or any other seating arrangement on the floor or on a comfortable seat.

Step 3: Concentrate on Your Breathing

Once you’re comfortably seated, close your eyes and concentrate on your breathing. Focus on the natural inhaling and exhaling of breath, feel your breath rise from your lungs through your nose. Try to empty your mind from random thoughts as much as possible at this stage.

Step 4: Notice Where your Mind Takes You

While focusing on your breathing there will be a time when your mind will wander away. this is where you have to notice where your mind has wandered off to during your session. 

 Step 5: Return Your Wandering Mind Back

After you’ve allowed your mind to roam free it’s time to come back. Start concentrating on your breathing to return. An important thing to remember here is never to judge or obsess over the thoughts wandering through your mind, just focus on coming back. That’s all it is to meditation, you wander away, you come back all the while having your focus on a single element. 

The Bottom line 

Meditation teaches us to be focused and determined. It helps you train your mind into being sharper allowing you to improve your concentration. It also helps us relax our wandering mind by reducing the stress levels. All you need is to get ten to fifteen minutes from your schedule to mediate your troubles away. Check out my 21 day meditation experiment featured on Tonic Toronto

Travelling offers a host of benefits for your mind, spirit, and body. Travel brings excitement, adventure and a way to refresh your mind from the stress that accompanies you day in and day out. Ask anyone who frequently travels about their experiences, they’ll attest to the eye-opening experiences they’ve had, the people, foods, and cultures they’ve come across have changed their perception on life. 

Travelling is a life-changing experience and here’s how a long trip can help reset your energy.

Take your Creativity to a Whole New Level

When you feel like you’re out of creative ideas for your business then travelling to a new destination is something you should think about. Take the time off, choose a particular destination locally or internationally that you feel would inspire you to be more creative.

 A study from the Academy of Management Journal revealed that there’s a strong link between enhanced creativity and immersive travel experiences acquired from witnessing different cultures. Travel forces you to think in different ways and have a contingency plan if one of your plans doesn’t turn out right. 

Travelling Stimulates Different Parts of Your Brain

Did you know that travelling could stimulate parts of your brain to make you more active and productive? Travelling encourages the growth of new cerebral connections with the brain forming a strong mind. Each time you’re in a new location your brain is trying to take everything in which triggers the production of new dendrites. If you’re looking to have a healthy mind and body you should start considering taking a long travel vacation. 

Planning a Trip Releases Endorphins

 Endorphins play a vital role in maintaining our mental health, it is known as the feel-good hormone. When you’re planning a trip to your favorite destination it releases endorphins. The excitement of the travel, meeting new people and exploring new cultures improves your mood and overall outlook on life. Travel is the ultimate mood booster for anyone who feels stressed out, depressed and overworked. Get your travel plans in action today to gain back your physical and mental energy. 

Get a New Perspective 

Travelling takes you places you’ve never seen before and experience a completely different culture and food. You get a chance to come out of your comfort zone and take a different perspective on life and all it offers. Travelling will help you transform into a better person, you’ll have more confidence in the decisions you make in your personal, professional life. Seeing how other people live, the food they eat, the festivals they celebrate, and the norms they follow will give you a chance to clear your misconceptions about people and their beliefs. 

The Bottom line 

Taking a long trip to a different location locally or internationally will give you a chance to get a new experience and be more creative. Broaden your horizon, strengthen your identity, step out of your comfort zone, and reset your energy by planning to a trip to your favorite destination. 

Failures do come your way at one time or the other. You might fail in achieving a coveted degree or position, or you might fail in convincing others of your point of view. Failing is always depressing and can make you feel like a loser. But your failures shape you just like your success do. They are equally important lessons and teach you how to do things differently. Your failures even make you humble. And they can give you the drive to do better or to excel even beyond your abilities. 

Moving On After A Failure

Many people will react differently after a failure. It also depends on how the person is broken. Perhaps is reprimanded for so many others for the failure. Or you feel that you have let other people down, the people who have loved you and supported you and believed in you. So it’s a very depressing state of mind. 

It’s never the end of the world. What’s important is that you accept your failures and learn from them. The best thing is that if you have good friends and family to help and support you to move forward and past your failures. 

How To Prevent

1. Detailed Planning

You must have heard of this common saying “You don’t plan to fail, you fail to plan”. When you have a goal to achieve, you need to work towards it. Without making a proper plan, how will you know what you should do, or the next move to take to be one step closer to your goals. With planning combined with good organizational skills, you will be on the right track to be successful in achieving your goals. Your failure margin becomes low when you do things according to a plan.

1. Be Honest To Yourself

The biggest mistake most people make after a failure is not reflecting upon the situation and what happened that caused their failure. Its important you be brutally honest with yourself on why the failure happened. Was it because you turned on the television, got involved in your phone, or found distraction of some form or the other? Once you honestly think back and confront your own self with the mistakes you’ve made, that’s when you will learn how to prevent your failures.

Learning And Making A Plan To Not Repeat Your Mistake

If you look at many successful people, they too have suffered failure in the past. Its good to recover from your mistakes. It is important that you keep your mistakes in memory so that you can recall what not to do. After you have experienced a failure, you need to learn from it and understand how to tackle the situation, so you don’t end up making the same mistakes over and over.

Conclusion 

Now that you have a good idea on how you should handle your failures and learn from your mistakes, its not to late to make amends and work the right way to achieve your goals and be successful in them.

Often when you find yourself stuck in a complex situation, the best thing you can do is to do what your gut says. When you don’t know any better, sometimes listening and trusting your gut feeling is what you should do. So what does the phrase trusting your gut instinct actually mean? Let’s go deeper into the details.

What Trusting Your Gut Means

It’s not like the name suggests that you are thinking through your stomach or your gut. You may find many a time that without any logic reasoning your gut feeling has helped you move in the right path or avoid following the wrong path. Its difficult for you to justify your action and decided just by saying that its your gut instinct. It doesn’t sound very scientific or logical. But experience has told you not to ignore your gut feeling. And that the feeling is definitely because of the experiences you have gained in your life. So its not just an instinct, its your body telling you to take the right decision or the right path.

Science Behind How Your Body Picks Up And Gets This Feeling (Subconscious)

Gut feelings or intuition or is the effect of the processing that occurs in the brain. Our brain is a predictive machine, continuously comparing current experiences and incoming sensory information with the stored memories and knowledge of previous experiences. Subconsciously, it makes a prediction of what will happen next.

Let’s take an example to better understand the science behind it. When someone makes you an attractive offer that is so convincing and so thorough and well-planned, you are attracted to what they are saying. Every document, every information seems legitimate. But, perhaps due to some experience you might have encountered in the past, you get a strange and unexplained feeling in your gut.  The gut feeling is basically your inner soul, your subconscious mind that makes you wary. It is telling you that there is something wrong and you should not accept the offer. 

Why Your Gut Knows Best

many a time one can be impulsive and make impulsive decisions. And sometimes, that impulse may or may not be the right decision. Many times, you will carefully and thoughtfully think out and still may not make the right decision. An experience might tell you that when you have ignored that gut feeling, you have regretted it. Its difficult to put so much faith into just a feeling. But it guides you in such a way that you cannot fathom. Actually, there are signs and reasons for that gut feeling. Its just that they are not apparent to you and for no strange reason, your gut feeling dictates you correctly. 

Conclusion 

So you see, when you get that sinking feeling in your stomach, don’t take it lightly and ignore you gut feeling. Saying that, you don’t need to react impulsively on just a gut feeling. But pay attention to your body, heart, mind, and soul and respect it.

A good night’s sleep (unfortunately almost non-existent today) is very important for your mind and body. Our natural sleep patterns are disturbed because most people don’t follow a healthy lifestyle. Eating junk food, spending too much time staring at different types of screens for work and leisure have disrupted our sleep cycles. We’re sharing the health benefits of getting a quality good night sleep to help you stay healthy and fit. 

Sleep Well to Boost Your Immune System

When you don’t get enough sleep, you’ll feel drowsy, lethargic, depressed, tired, and you’ll struggle to keep your eyes open during the day. Getting a quality sleep ensures that you have successfully cycled through the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and Non-Rem or Non-rapid eye movement (NREM)through the night. Boosting the immune system is the biggest advantage of a good night’s sleep free from any external interruptions. Over 7 hours of sleep every night will help boost your immune system and keep you disease free for years to come. 

Improves your Overall Health and Appetite

Lack of proper sleep has many adverse effects on your body. Insomnia and insufficient sleeping hours are the main culprits behind obesity and other illnesses like diabetes. The quality of the sleep is equally important as the quantity, when you’re well rested you’ll notice that you aren’t craving junk food as much as you used to. Calling in an early night will improve your appetite and overall health. 

How to Sleep Better? 

This simple question has a very complicated answer! How many times has it happened that each night you go to bed after a long hard day to catch up on your lost sleep, but, no matter how hard you try to get some sleep, there’s absolutely no sign of sleep! After trying everything like backward counting, counting the sheep the stars and reading books you’re still wide awake! If you’re that person then read on to find out how to get better sleep.

Avoid Eating Heavy Meals Before Bedtime

Have an early dinner and avoid eating unhealthy junk food just minutes before bedtime. The best approach is to finish your dinner (preferably a healthy one) at least three hours before bedtime. Your body releases melatonin that helps your body relax and ready to get some sleep. 

Keep Your Phone Away After 9 pm 

To improve your health, it’s essential to change your lifestyle and make some hard choices like switching off your phone after 9 pm! The blue glare from different devices including smartphones is known to disrupt the REM and NREM cycles. Keep your phone away and over time you will develop a healthy sleep pattern.  

Avoid Caffeine in Late Afternoon 

The first thing you need to do is avoid taking caffeine after 4 pm every day. Caffeine in the morning is nothing short of a blessing but taking a cup during mid or late afternoon disrupts your sleeping cycle. Avoid carbonated drinks and too many liquids before bedtime because the constant need to pee will disrupt your sleep cycle. 

Colors impact our lives much more than we even think. The important thing is to know what colors naturally suits you. Your beauty can be enhanced by the right choice of apparel, makeup, and accessories. The most expensive suit may let you down if it is in conflict with your skin, hair and eye color.

It so happens that you admire someone and what they are wearing, and you wish to copy their fashionable look. Its innate in you. But what we don’t realize is that you and she may have different features. What suits her and makes her look fashionable looks loud on you. 

Regardless of what the latest fashion trends are or what looks fabulous on the model in a fashion magazine, its important to understand what may or may not look good on you. So how do you know which colors are meant for you?

Color analysis is a way to help you determine what your color season is. Are you a spring, summer, autumn, or winter? Although this is not a perfect classification, it is certainly helpful in finding out what shades work best for you.

Read on further to know is your season according to your eye, hair, and skin color. Once you have determined your season, you can find out what colors will suit you and help you bring out your style and beauty. 

Winter

Eyes: dark hazel, Black, or black-brown.

Hair: salt and pepper, black-brown, steel gray, or medium brown.

Skin: olive with no peach or pink undertones, medium beige, black, or black-brown.

Best colors for you if winter is your shade:

Charcoal, black, icy gray, black-brown, gray, red-brown, hot pink, rust, true red, blue red, aubergine, lemon yellow, mint, light green, olive, emerald green, clear teal, purple, bright periwinkle, blue, navy, and chinese blue.

Summer 

Eyes: gray, blue, or green.

Hair: Light ash brown or light ash blonde.

Skin: Porcelain, pale beige, pink beige, or ivory. (Usually pink-toned.)

Best colors for you if summer is your shade:

Light gray, cocoa, gray blue, powder pink, taupe, rose pink, clear salmon, coral pink, light lemon yellow, clear red, light aqua, spruce, blue green, sky blue, light navy, lavender, medium blue, and violet.

Fall

Eyes: Dark hazel, dark brown, dark green or black.

Hair: Auburn, Medium brown, black or deep chestnut.

Skin: neutral beige, warm beige, olive, dark brown, or golden brown.

Best colors for you if fall is your shade:

true red, tomato red, terracotta, salmon pink, purple, peach, moss, marigold, lime bronze, light yellow, lemon yellow, jade, hot turquoise, evergreen, deep red, dark rose, dark purple, Chinese blue, cerulean, camel, black, Black brown,

Conclusion

The world is full of an infinite range of colors. There’s a lot to choose from. However, you need to make sure you pick the right colors according to your skin and features. Now that you know what shades work best for you, you can boldly and confidently rock your look every time.