We are all told over and over again nowadays that meditation is good for us, but few of us know how to meditate properly. Meditation is supposed to be very good for mental health and also for our physical well-being. In a highly stressed out life, where the average person works about 40 hours a week, meditation seems to be a wonderful way to bring balance.

• In order to meditate properly you must realize that the one key factor is that you must be able to focus your mind on one particular thing. By focusing the mind, you give yourself a type of rest because the mind is then not flying left and right with all sorts of mental aberrations.
• Proper meditation also involves bodily relaxation. Body relaxation and the reduction of tension can greatly affect the mind since there seems to be a direct correlation between physical tension and emotion.
• There is another important point to meditation that I must mention, and this is the concept of inner space. inner space is our internal conscious reality; it is the reality that we experience if we are able to go inside ourselves and ignore usual sense data. It is essentially the reality that you would be able to experience if you were put inside an isolation tank where you could not use any of your five senses. Proper meditation therefore involves this kind of internal consciousness and is the key to creating expanded conscious awareness. I mention it here because proper meditation is not just a way to relax but it must also be a way to expand yourself and your being. Without this final component, meditation just becomes a task and not a way to expand your horizons.

With the above in mind that, there are three ways to meditate properly:

1.  Concentrate your mind on one thing. To do this you could either concentrate on an object in your mind, an object that you see before you, or perhaps a task that you try to do as consciously as possible. You could for example look at an apple on the table in front of you, trying to keep your attention solely on this apple and not letting anything get in the way of this attention. You could also concentrate on an image of an apple that you are holding in your mind. An internal image is a more difficult task since you must be very good at visualization in order to do this, but if you can master this technique, this is a great way to have yourself focus on one thing.
You could also focus your mind on a particular task; many people for example like to concentrate on their breathing and this is a wonderful way to keep your mind focused on one thing. The key to this kind of meditation is to train your attention to focus solely on this one task and to bring your mind back to this task if it decides to wander. Read ” Learn the power of concentration” if you are interested in this method.

2.  You can meditate by concentrating on your body, and by concentrating on the act of relaxing your body. This is sort of like the task that I mentioned above but it does two things; first of course it allows you to focus on one thing to the exclusion of all other things, but secondly it also allows you to relax your body and therefore take your self into a natural trance by becoming deeply relaxed. Read “How to relax” if you are interested in this method.

3. The final method to meditate properly is to try and go into inner space. One of the best and easiest ways to do this is to imagine that you have a dial that controls the volume of your senses. By dialing this volume down you are imaginatively turning down how much you can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. After turning the volume of your senses down, explore what is left. Explore this reality.

It is up to you to explore what you like best, and which technique you think would provide the best kind of meditation for you. Meditation done properly is in many ways dreaming, it will alter brain chemicals and it will balance your hormonal levels. In this way meditation is a great rest for your body and it allows for certain excess chemicals to be correctly processed so that they do not hinder your natural functions. It also allows you to develop more chemicals in the brain that the waking consciousness needs to function at its best. With a little effort you too can learn to meditate properly and attain new levels of relaxation and awareness.