Donna L Brogan.com

Yoga is becoming a part of life for many people. It is a way that you can integrate body poses and breathing exercises with added meditation to give you peace of mind.  It seems to make everything right with the world.

Meditation comes from intense concentration. The person focuses on a single object so intensively that they think of nothing besides the awareness of that object. In yoga meditation is the highest point of the Eight Limbs of Yoga.

These “eight limbs” define yoga as a lifestyle:

• your attitude with the world around you
• your attitudes towards yourself
• physical posturing
• breathing exercises
• withdrawing the senses
• concentrating
• contemplating
• enlightenment

Meditation calms the mind and offers many health benefits way before enlightenment. Regular meditation will help reduce stress and anxiety. It can also lower your blood pressure and decrease your risk of a heart attack. Side effects of yoga are improvement of  concentration, clarity of thought, and can release your creative side.

With some research, yoga will help with cognitive, emotional, and sensory data of the brain. Meditation may also slow natural shrinkage of the frontal cortex due to aging. Try meditating for 40 minutes a day. Actually, most change happens in the brain’s right half.

Meditation isn’t easy, clearing the mind of extraneous thought is very difficult, and clearing it of all thought is even more difficult. It will take time and hard work in order to learn how to do meditate.

To begin, you will want to sit somewhere quiet, with your back and head straight. You will need learn some basic breathing exercises first.  First,  close your eyes, breathe in through your nose and exhale through your mouth. Focus on your breath, be sure to get cool air to enter through your nose and the warm air out your mouth. Redirect all of your thoughts and just focus on the warm air leaving. You should start off with some short meditations that last a few minutes. Most beginners will start off counting their breaths so that they can focus on the breathing, if you do this  only count to four and then start over again.