5 Meditation Tips to Quiet your Mind

Many people struggle with noisy, thought-filled minds and come to meditation to hopefully find a way to decrease the chatter or get away from it for a while.

There are a few techniques you can try to calm the voice in your head by either giving it something else to focus on or by engaging a different part of your brain.

• Count 1 - 10: While following your breath, count each cycle of in and out as one then count to ten and then start again at one. Anytime your thoughts distract you, gently bring yourself back to counting your breath. This will focus the verbal centers of your brain on thinking of the numbers instead of chasing your thoughts.

• Experience emotions: If you bring your awareness to an emotion (gratitude, love or compassion are pleasant ones) and allow yourself to really feel the fullness of the emotion throughout your entire body, this engages your emotional centers in the brain which then allows the verbal centers to relax.

• Observing wholeness: By stretching your awareness to observe something with a wider perspective, your verbal centers will quiet down. It takes a large part of the brain to focus on your breath as a full thing, seeing the in and out and all sensations as one movement. Or you can observe your entire body all at once, feeling all parts of your body at the same time.

• Visualizing: By visualizing something in your mind, you engage your visual centers of your brain leaving your verbal centers to calm and quiet down.Try visualizing a calming place or something beautiful in your mind, seeing the detail and feeling what it would be like to really be there in person.
  

• Going into your thoughts: At times, our thoughts just want to be heard and by allowing ourselves to listen then we can hear what our mind is thinking about. So instead of trying to quiet your mind, follow the thoughts and see where they take you. Eventually they will relax and quiet down on their own.

Try one of these techniques during your next meditation or anytime you would like to quiet your mind.

Which one works best for you?