Guided Mindfulness Meditations to Improve Your Wellbeing
Practice these mindfulness-guided meditations to alleviate your distress and improve your Wellbeing
What is a Guided Mindfulness Meditation?
Mindfulness Practice is the cornerstone of psychological flexibility and Well-being. It isn’t your fault when you get caught up with unhelpful worries and judgements – this is how we’ve evolved. Our minds use language for cooperating and solving problems, which is both a gift and a curse.
Language is both a gift and a curse.
On the one hand, our minds help us talk to each other in ways that make us feel safe, offer support and build harmony. We can accurately predict what will happen under a specific set of circumstances. For example, we know what will happen to our health if we smoke every day, and we know we will be tired tomorrow if we stay up late. This level of cognitive processing is a uniquely human capability.
On the other hand, our minds create a verbal world full of fear, anxiety, shame and anger that has the potential to exert significant control over what we do day to day. We can worry when there is little to fear, judge and criticise our reactions when there is little that we’ve done wrong and imagine conflicts with little chance of taking place. It is not your fault – this is how we’ve evolved.
Busy Mind V Wise Mind
Unlike any other animal, humans have an exceptional capacity to live in two worlds. Language allows people to live in their minds, inside a verbal world full of judgement, worry and rumination. This wordy private world is a ‘Busy Mind’ because it keeps thinking and working.
A Wise Mind is a different mode that opens up the possibilities to enrich your life by helping you make better work, relationships, personal time, health and well-being decisions. In ‘Wise Mind’, you adjust your pace, often slowing down to unwind and let go of the day’s struggles. Mindful awareness can prevent you from running off in the wrong direction, which is typical of a busy Mind. It will save you time, energy and unnecessary suffering.
How do you change your habits?
Persistence, Practice and Patience
It requires you to build better habits and coping strategies to improve your well-being and alleviate your suffering. You may see the benefits of your practice relatively quickly. It may also take weeks of consistent training to reap the rewards of your effort. Knowing this from the start can allow you to set realistic expectations.
Daily Practice
Practising every day will build your skills and improve your well-being more quickly. If you persist, even when you forget or decline to practice one day, you will build the skills necessary to feel and function better. Research has shown that when you live your life fully, you will experience benefits the next day.
Living life Fully – The purpose of daily practice
What do these skills do? Your investment in a daily practice of guided mindful meditations is to make it easier to live your life as fully as possible. Life will sometimes be painful, stressful and distressing. When this experience moves in, we tend to revert to short-term strategies that seem like a good idea. For example, isolating yourself, eating poorly, escaping through TV or excessive alcohol and lying about can seem attractive. Still, they rarely make you feel better or give greater meaning or vitality to your life. Practice these guided mindfulness meditations, and you will become more adept at making better choices.
GUIDED MINDFULNESS MEDITATIONS
Try out these guided mindfulness meditations by planning a time of day to sit down and stick in your earphones. It needn’t be the same daily because it must fit in with your lifestyle and routines. The important thing is to plan and implement it.
Try out different times of the day and other places. You can do it in the morning before you leave for work, during your lunch breaks when you transition between tasks of locations or in the evening before you sleep. See what works for you.
Mindful Awareness Meditations
Mindfulness of Thoughts Meditations
Acceptance of Emotions Meditations
Compassionate Self-Awareness Meditations