Role of Meditation to Yoga Practice

Simply put, yoga is never like it is if you take out meditation from the equation. That summarizes how important meditation is to the practice. But your ability to fully understand the importance of meditation's role during yoga lies in your understanding of its benefits and how you can maximize it. Read on to find out how you can take the benefits of yoga meditation one step further.

The kind of preparation that one makes before embarking on a meditation practice varies from one individual to another. However, beginners can opt to go for standard preparation procedures to establish the proper mindset needed for an efficient meditation practice. Take note of the preparation tips below and see which one works best for you:

• If you want to relax your mind before beginning your meditation session, you can opt to write down thoughts on your journal or any writing material. This will help facilitate as you try to do deep down inside yourself and reveal subconscious thoughts. More importantly, scribbling down random thoughts enable you to enter your stream of consciousness.
• If writing does not motivate your mind to enter meditative state, you can try counting as a form of self-hypnosis. Make sure to do the counting in a slow manner and you will find yourself mentally alert but yet relaxed at the end.
• Now, it is time to forge much deeper into your pre-meditation routine by trying to fix your attention on a single object. Try to visualize at the beginning and eventually allow your imagination to take over.
• Imagine a place that inspires positive thoughts and emotions to enable your body and mind to relax. You can also try staring into an object near you to help your mind settle.

Proper breath control is important in yoga and meditation. This is why every aspect of your yoga practice involves its own breathing exercises, which also applies with meditation. When performing these breathing exercises, your goal is to provide balance on both body and mind. In addition, breathing enables you to stay calm and relaxed to properly focus on meditation as you rid all your worries away. Once you have silenced the mind, you are able to maximize the impact of meditation in your practice of yoga.

You can begin this slowing down and listening to each breath. Keep your focus on each breath until your body becomes completely still and you can attain internal awareness.

This yoga meditation technique is widely performed by expert yogis because they believe it to be the most effective in terms of assisting your mind in getting rid of daily stress and worries. When your mind is constantly being distracted by work, school, or household worries, then it creates blockages to your meditation practice.

To perform yoga intuition meditation, you must write down in a sheet of paper a specific issue that you wanted to resolve. This particular issue will serve as the main focus for your meditation practice. Once you have completed that step, you can assume a relaxed sitting position. Try to focus so you can get your meditation activity started by repeating the same question on your mind as you progress deep into your practice. If there are any physical or emotional tension that might arise, focus on that as well.

Begin with your breathing exercises so you can slowly release any tension that has built up. Slow breathing is highly suggested for this type of meditation, allowing you to enter a subconscious state of mind. When you feel relaxed, reiterate the question on your mind and focus on clearing this off your head.

Aside from the ability to relax and remove any sources of stress in your daily life, meditation has more importance, which involves improving your brain performance. This is really challenging though given that trying to remain focused to achieve a meditative state is in itself quite a challenge already. But being able to do that offers a lot of wonderful benefits to the brain including the following:

• Doing meditation makes your brain more efficient in processing information that is received.
• Meditation helps to improve overall brain function, such as heightened awareness, brain perception, and increased efficiency.
• Constant practice of meditation is known to thicken your insula, which serve as the brain's thinking center. Thus, it makes you more receptive to your surroundings while also improving your ability to think logically during stressful situations.

Grounding is a technique performed at the end of each yoga meditation to enable you to return in your usual state of mind. Since meditation involves entering into a different dimension, you need this to get back into your actual physical situation. This is also important since it will enable you to recall what had just transpired in your meditation practice so you can gain more insight into this activity. The better able you are to master this technique, you will also heighten the level of awareness for your daily activities. You can try three different methods for grounding and they are discussed below.

One way to perform grounding is to involve your physical body in a physical activity, especially knowing that it is mostly your mind that is actively participating in the act of meditation. Feeling your physical body and its parts is a great way to bring back your consciousness to the present such as wriggling your fingers and toes, shaking your head left and right, stomping your feet, shrugging shoulders, and clasping your hands together.

You can also write down your thoughts, insights, or imaginations that came up during your meditation. You can read through your writings at a later time and you will often find realizations that did not occur to you at the time of your meditation performance.

And finally, you can also sketch images associated in your meditation session. At some point, you will encounter symbols that have deeper significance and it will bring you to that understanding by doing this grounding technique.