Finding Your Zen

Find your Zen aka find your peace. How do you find yours? What do you do to achieve it? There are numerous ways people calm down and find peace. In this episode I chat about a handful of ways that I have personally found beneficial.

There are many benefits to meditation. Personally, I have been calmer since I started meditating. I feel like I make better decisions and I feel happier. It is scientifically proven that meditation reduces stress. Not surprisingly stress is one of the reasons many people start meditating. Meditation has been proven to reduce anxiety and help stabilize emotional health. It can improve your self-awareness and lengthen your attention span. Quite often we have the tendency to want to do things quickly and as such we have a short attention span and struggle to slow down; meditation will help with that. Three other things that meditation has been shown to do are: reduce age related memory loss, generate kindness, and. Maybe that comes from the preconceived notion on how you are supposed to meditate. The truth is, there are many different ways to meditate, and everybody does things a little differently.

The first basic thing you can do to find your zen is something that anybody can do. All you need to do is just sit outside and breathe in the fresh air. There’s a Japanese study that has proven that fresh air helps heal you. You can bring a cup of coffee with you if you want to, just being outside and breathing in the air is tremendously helpful.

A second thing you can do to find your zen is chase your passions. When you chase your passions, you are doing something that you love to do. You are living your life to the fullest, which is calming and will make you happy. There might be some things about your passion that might make you upset, for example if you’re fishing and fail to catch anything, but you’re still doing something you love to do. I encourage you to stop and breathe while you’re doing whatever your passion is. Just stop for a minute and breathe and think about what you’re doing and how you are doing something you love to do.

The third way you can meditate is working solely on your breath. Breathe in and focus on how you’re breathing and what it feels like as the breath passes through you. This involves a lot of focus and can be tricky, especially since the brain always wants to think about different things and wanders. When the other thoughts come into your head recognize that they are there but dismiss them to come back to them later.

Another way of doing this is being mindful of the things around you and what everything feels like. Think about what the ground feels like against your skin, expand it out, think about what’s in the room and continue expanding outwards. If you find your mind keeps wandering, you can try to look at the thoughts from an outside perspective. When thoughts enter your mind try to see what somebody outside of yourself would think of them. Personally, that is something that I struggle with, but will improve on as I practice it more. Go ahead and try it out for yourself!

Those are just a few ways you can meditate. Find one that works for you and try them out. When you are able to find your zen and calm your mind on demand all of your stress just melts away. You will feel incredible and start to see the benefits from it. It does take a while to see the benefits. So don’t expect to do it once and feel a huge shift. But continue to practice and within a few sessions you will start to feel the difference! And once you can get there you will definitely feel calmer and better. If you are interested in trying some guided meditations, I have recently started putting some up on Insight Timer which is a free app. Look up Spencer Jones and find me, I have a few posted already and I really hope that they will help you find your zen.

I would love to hear what you think about Finding Your Zen and my new guided meditations on Insight Timer! Please send me a message on social media at @Jonesinfor or email me at smj190@gmail.com. Thanks!