Wellness is a term we use to describe a state of physical, mental, and emotional health. For those who look even deeper into illness causation, we could also include spiritual health in the mix. While there are many definitions of what constitutes health for all those interconnected systems, I lean toward describing an optimum condition...
Category: Integrative Medicine
Marching Forward
March stomped in on worn-out snowshoes in our area amid single-digit temps, creating many long sighs with eyes to the sky, asking, “Is this really necessary?” We in the Midwest aren’t alone in those sentiments or conditions, but we all deal with it the best that we can and keep our lives moving forward, hoping...
Is It a Guided Meditation or Hypnosis?
One of my most enjoyable discoveries from when I took hypnosis training was in realizing that hypnotists often use guided meditations to help relax a client and help them reach that deeper connection necessary for changing subconscious programming. I was happy about it because I had already been creating guided meditations for my REIKI students to...
One More Meditation for Your “Self-Help” Tool Box
I really do write and teach about other things than meditation, but so far I’ve been focused on providing some good, basic information on a variety of meditation techniques that can help improve the quality of people’s lives. So before I switch subjects, I wanted to give you another meditation to sample. This is one...
Another Simple Meditation Using a Mantra
Mantra, is a Sanskrit term for “word.” And basically, that’s what a mantra meditation entails—simply repeating a particular word or phrase over and over on every exhalation of breath. It would be similar to doing the basic Breath Meditation mentioned in the previous post, but instead of focusing solely on the breath moving in and...
Learning a Basic Meditation
Today’s world is definitely high-tech, high-energy, and high-stress. Our concentration is constantly pulled from one moment to the next by a myriad of external sources and communication devices. So finding a way to relax either during the day or at day’s end becomes extremely important to our own well-being, both physically and mentally. No doubt...
Promoting Healthy Bodies and Increasing Mental Clarity
Just by using one or two of the simple relaxation or guided meditations mentioned previously, you can soon realize how beneficial meditation is to your overall health and well-being. Clearing the mind, if only for 5-15 minutes at a time, can be totally refreshing allowing us to better navigate the rest of our busy days....
Exploring a Few Meditation Techniques
“Meditation” is a general term that describes many different techniques used to quiet the mind for a variety of purposes, many of which were described here in an earlier post. In other words, there are different forms of meditation and many reasons to meditate. We will explore a few of those forms and describe how...
The Intention of Meditation—Quieting the Mind
Why do we need to quiet the mind? The mind is a processing center—continually inputting, analyzing, and directing body actions in reaction to the perceived degree of safety or threat around it. Left to its meandering tendencies, the mind normally chatters non-stop about past incidences or interactions—rehashing memories and the emotions attached to them. At...
A Brief History of Meditation from East to West
Most basic forms of meditation can be traced to religious origins where the primary purpose was to aid believers in the development of a more spiritual, reverent attitude toward 1) a perceived deity, 2) toward the source of creation, or 3) toward feeling one with the universal life-force energy. From Christianity, to Judaism, to Islam,...