If you find yourself struggling to find peace and understanding in your daily life, it might be time to adapt some meditation practices. Meditation is a wonderful way to relieve stress and tension, center yourself, and focus on your mind, body, and spirit.
Meditation on its own is a way to clear your mind of your stresses and worries, and find that inner peace you have been looking for. There are many different forms of meditation, from deep breathing to mindful meditation, but today we are going to be talking about the Rainbow Meditation Technique.
This guided meditation technique is going to give your meditation practice a little more structure.
1. Aspects of Meditation and Self Discovery
Before you begin to study specific a type of meditation, it always a good idea to learn about a few methods and procedures. The next few paragraphs will explain the purpose of some aspects of meditation.
Deep Breathing Exercises
When looking at many of the components to meditation, one of the most important parts of this act to be considered should be the deep breathing. As you focus on your breathing patterns, you will gain more awareness of your body. With each breath, you can become more conscious of where your stress might be hiding, and the simple act of focusing on the rhythm of your breathing can help you to become more centered.
On a basic physical level, healthy breathing ensures that your tissues are being supplied with the oxygen that they need. This is especially important for complex organs like the brain. Many cultures, religions and exercise programs incorporate deep breathing as some portion of meditation activity.
There are a large number of different breathing exercises that you can try, and many of them can be found with a search on the internet.
Posture Positioning and Poses
In some meditation techniques, strict attention to specific poses for posture may be required. Every single meditation instruction ever written has begun with some sort of paragraph or a section that explains that meditation is supposed to be done while your body is at rest or in a specific pose that helps you to achieve a certain level of focus.
Some styles include crossed legs like the Padmasana pose will have your legs crossed, while others like the Vajrasana pose will have you kneeling. While these are effective poses for a seasoned yoga user, they might not be quite as relaxing for a person who is attempting to relax for the purpose of meditation.
As a beginner, an effective plan will have you sitting or lying down so that there won’t be any kind of distractions that can come from discomfort.
Meditation Time Periods
When you’re planning to engage in meditation, it’s best to be sure to schedule some time for yourself so that you can proceed uninterrupted. When you are first beginning to learn to meditate though, you might be surprised to find that it takes a little practice to get settled in and stay in the meditative state.
At first, you may only be able to stay concentrated for about 5 - 10 minutes, but don’t worry because that sort of thing is normal. As time goes on, the repeated efforts will make it easier for you to keep your mind from wandering, which often causes you to break your concentration.
Eventually, it will be possible for you to meditate for 25 - 30 minutes, so patience with yourself is an essential key to making serious progress.
Power of Visualization
In the last few decades, one of the most repeated components of achievement includes information about taking the time to imagine an environment or a scenario. The most common example of this technique is known as the “Happy Place” or “Quiet Place.”
These environments are usually chosen by the subject who may select a location of some significance that allows them to soothe their mind, or enter a greater state of comfort. In some cases, therapists will employ a combination of methods to elicit recall such as aromatherapy, or play music to help increase the amount and speed of relaxation response.
These methods are used by a few different types of interactions with conscious and subconscious thought such as hypnotherapy. Once the subject has entered the area, they can begin to work on specific elements of the mind with a reduced amount of stress.
Many in the medical community were fascinated when a group of researchers used equipment to track the vital signs of subjects, and discovered that this practice has the ability to lower high blood pressure and other sides effects that are closely related to the amount of stress that you experience.
Biofeedback
Sometimes it can be a good idea to know much more detailed info about your body’s responses to stimuli. This is where technology can be an aid to your mental and spiritual health. Biofeedback is simply a procedure that collects information about your body through surface electromyography electrodes (SEMG) that are attached directly to the surface of your skin.
The electrodes can take various readings of your vital signs such as your pulse rate, muscle tension, blood pressure, and rate of breathing. Now that a doctor now has some information about how your body reacts and where it carries tension, they can now begin to make recommendations that are more tailored to your experience.
It’s important to note that this kind of procedure should really only be done by a professional with the proper equipment. There are a number of less than reputable companies that are willing to make a fast dollar from desperate consumers.
2. The Rainbow Meditation Technique
In order to get started, many natural health practitioners recommend that you take your time to read through the instructions several times before you begin so that you can be familiar with the order.
The first thing that you want to do, is visualize a rainbow in the sky. Be sure that you can envision all of the colors of the rainbow as vividly as possible. After you have the colors firmly fixed in your mind, you can begin the meditation process.
Red – Root Chakra
Take a breath and be sure that it is a complete and deep breath. While you are inhaling, picture the color red in your mind. This color symbolizes the tension in your body, especially in your spine. Exhale and release the tension that you are holding in your body.
Orange – Sacral Chakra
Take a breath and picture the color orange in your mind. Orange is your current emotional state. Slowly exhale, and center yourself emotionally.
Yellow – Solar Plexus
Take a deep breath slowly, and as you fill your lungs, see the color yellow in your mind. The color yellow here is your solar plexus chakra, where you are going to improve your self-awareness and confidence.
Green – Heart Chakra
Picture the color green in your mind as you slowly inhale. As you draw in air, imagine peacefulness, or something that reminds you of peace. The green is your inner peace, expressing what you feel in your heart. Exhale.
Blue – Throat Chakra
Imagine the color blue. Begin inhaling slowly as you picture the blue very clearly. The blue is the love within you. Love surrounds and fills you. When talking about chakras, this can also be for your throat when imagining your voice and what you can do with it.
Indigo – Third Eye
Breath deeply, and take a slow inhaling breath. As you inhale, visualize the indigo.
The indigo is your secret self. Exhale slowly as you reflect.
Violet – Crown Chakra
As the final level, it’s can be good to spend a slightly longer amount of time with this one. Slowly begin to inhale. As you inhale, imagine violet. This is the level of your most vulnerable and secret self, as it represents what it is in your mind and subconscious
Exhale slowly continuing to reflect on your vulnerable and intimate feelings. This is a place of true inspiration, and honest creativity. Slowly release yourself as you continue breathing deeply. Your body should feel better from the release of tension from the multiple levels of your mind.
At this time, you can begin to see the color of the rainbow in the opposite order as you rise from the depths of your mind and emotions. Say the names in your mind as you travel up and out, Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, and release. Envision your body as having been cleansed. Open your eyes, and begin the refreshed part of your day.
3. Benefits of Meditation
After looking at many of the practices that appear in many cultures, researchers decided that they should actually get together and take a closer look at many of these beliefs about the power of meditation, and the information that they collected probably surprised them to a large extent.
It Reduces Stress
Stress is a bad thing in basically all instances. This is because when people are stressed out, their body is working on a much less efficient level than normal. Some of this is due to the hormone cortisol, which can trigger all sorts of harmful effects like inflammation, high blood pressure and anxiety.
Those symptoms can in turn create other problems that lead to difficulty sleeping, which can cause a cyclical effect. Any form of reducing stress can be life-saving, and many studies done on meditation have even noted that reduced stress has a powerful effect on diseases like IBS.
Improves Your Attention Span
When you meditate, one of the key factors that you will see is a noticeable increase in your ability to observe, record and recall information. These three factors are at the forefront of being sure that you can complete tasks without being constantly distracted by things.
Studies have shown that workers who spend time meditating in the morning tend to be distracted less, and are able to zip back to tasks at hand more quickly if they did become distracted. The workers were also able to recall steps to their tasks more clearly than the workers who didn’t participate in the meditation periods.
Through the study, it was also remarked that some people showed major signs of improvement in as little as 5 days, so you won’t know what you can accomplish until you try it yourself.
Reduces Anxiety
A lot of the time, anxiety could be a response that is triggered by the physical effects of stress. The combinations of deep breathing, and slow self-consideration help to reduce the negative responses that shallow fast breathing can trigger. That can have a range of benefits for multiple type of anxiety disorders, panic attacks, and compulsive behaviors.
Several studies have concluded that improvements are not only possible, but also noted with 3 - 4 weeks of the newly introduced habit. Participants who continued the meditation noted that they were still seeing improvements in coping with anxiety at 12 weeks. This is really great news for people who suffer from anxiety and panic attacks, because many people who battle these disorders find themselves taking complex drugs that give them a host of side effects over time.
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Thank you for sharing such a detailed, informative post on such an important topic of meditation. Hopefully this will help more folks gain the benefits from a meditation practice. I know for me it plays a very important part in keeping me happy and healthy!
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