Can Guided Meditation or Guided Relaxation In Yoga Reduce Stress?
ByWhat is Guided Meditation? This meditation technique generally involves listening to
a voice (live or recorded on meditation CD) with your eyes closed as you relax your body and focus
your mind on vividly imagining the world described by the speaker. If you've been attending yoga classes, you may find your instructor leading this type of exercise at the end of your sessions.
Often a guided meditation will have a specific purpose or goal in mind such as helping
you relax, helping you feel creative or artistic, or even helping to build your confidence
and see yourself as growing more like the person you want to become. Guided relaxation can help you get rid of stress.
I went to some biofeedback relaxation sessions in which the instructor taught guided relaxation techniques. It was so successful that the most high-strung insomniac member of our group repeatedly fell asleep during each session. And she didn't relax easily!
Guided meditation is much like hypnosis in that it offers you suggestions on improving
your mental, physical and emotional state that are pleasant during the meditation session
itself, but have the propensity to stay with you even after the meditation is over
and even improve your quality of life over time as you adopt new beliefs and grow comfortable
with experiencing feelings of joy, creativity, relaxation and confidence.
Some people like to use guided meditation as a an exploratory process. The guiding
voice may give vague suggestions which call upon the listener (the meditator) to "fill-in the blanks."
For example you might imagine wiping clean past hurts and replacing them with images
of happy, rewarding times in your life. You might imagine a "Special place" where you
are very relaxed. In this type of guided meditation, the guide can be fairly generic
and the technique allows whatever is important to you to come to the surface.
Alternatively, sometimes the meditation guide will bring you to very specific places
or people in your life. "Imagine the times when you feel ashamed about your weight," or
"Remember the times that you have worried about how smoking can affect your health." These
examples can evoke much more specific imagery that can help you address certain
problems in your life. However, once these problems have been mostly resolved, the
guided meditation tapes pertaining to these specific topics may be less useful.
A third type of guided meditation is less "hypnosis" or "Self-improvement" focused and more
"spiritual" or "universal" in nature. You might be guided through a fantasy world
including elements of nature such as forests, mountain tops, under-sea civilizations or
even outer-space. Or you could experience a reminder for specific focus on relaxing
your body, focusing on a flame or even on melting snow.
The key to being successful with guided meditation is to find out what style works for
you. You want to find a guide who helps you relax and reach a calm meditative state
quickly and easily. Next, you want to be sure that the journey the guide takes you
on is one that you find personally meaningful, relaxing or constructive.
I, myself. experimented with reading many different scripts for self-hypnosis and then
recording my own voice to create a customized "just for me" self-hypnosis journey
that I found personally meaningful.
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