Discover the ways meditation can refresh your life in 2023!
Meditation can help you experience a renewed sense of clarity and peace in your life. It can help you to become more mindful of your thoughts, feelings, and surroundings and create a space for inner growth and development. With regular practice, meditation can help you to prioritise self-care, build more positive relationships, and increase your resilience and overall wellbeing. Start your journey today and explore the power of meditation to refresh your life!
As we flow into a new year, it can often be a time for reflection and planning. An opportunity to honour the year that has been and consider the things that we would like to welcome into our life for the year ahead.
Exploring new passions, deepening further into self-care, and tending to your inner creativity and motivation are just some examples of things that may be stirring within you as you look ahead at the range of possibilities on offer for the next 365 days.
If you feel yourself yearning for any of these things, then meditation may be a wonderful way to explore these aspects of yourself within your daily life. While meditation is a personal and individual journey there are some common benefits that many who practice experience.
Feelings of clarity, gratitude, connection to self and others, inner healing, physiological and emotional balance, and joy are just some of the nurturing ways that meditation may positively impact your life. Meditation can also open us up to unfelt feelings, which may feel challenging at first, but ultimately lead to greater freedom and healing. It’s important to seek support if any feelings become overwhelming. This may mean talking to a friend, a meditation teacher or a therapist.
Let’s have a look at how meditation, and specifically which meditation techniques may be able to offer you a fresh approach to your daily life, a new perspective, and a joyful outlook in 2023:
1. Meditation for authenticity and love
Finding a place to simply be, as you are, resting in your authentic self without the daily demands of roles, responsibilities and expectations can be hard to find in our modern-paced society. Whilst this elusive goal may seem out of reach for most of us, there is a place where this can be possible. That place is in the quiet of your meditation practice.
Meditation can support you in cultivating a deep sense of inner knowing and understanding of who you are. It can allow you to turn down the noise of the outside world and take a moment for quiet reflection and contemplation. It can be a place where there is simply nothing to do or no-one to be other than who you are moment to moment.
Taking time to slow down and tune into your authentic self can help support feelings of reduced stress, a greater sense of self, a depth of inner healing and can also cultivate a sense of inner balance and harmony.
As Katherine Dunham says, “Go within every day and find the inner strength so that the world will not blow your candle out.”. Meditation allows you to reignite the flame of who you are. In essence, meditation supports us to lead with love. Through tending to our own emotional, mental, and physical needs we can bring a fresh outlook to ourselves, our family and friends and our broader community through the gift of loving, compassionate presence.
If in 2023 you feel a deep yearning to connect with any of these qualities, meditation techniques such as self-compassion practices as well as embodiment practices such as moving meditation are wonderful techniques that can help you align to your inner state of authenticity and love.
2. Meditation for inspiration and motivation
Have you ever sat down to meditate and suddenly as you quiet your mind a brilliant idea or spark of motivation appears?
If you’ve experienced this before then you may know how beneficial meditation can be for cultivating inspiration and motivation in our lives. Not only can meditation be a place for inner healing, love, and compassion it can also be a place where inspiration and motivation grow. When we take the time to slow down and listen to the whispers within, what we can find is that our inner source of inspiration and motivation is abundant.
As we navigate the busyness of life, we may feel like we’re unable to find the motivation to start that dream job, finish that big project or simply get through our daily-to-do list. Feeling low in energy and being pulled down by the complexities of the world around us, inspiration and motivation may seem hard to find. However, through the gift of meditation we can come back to that inner place of inspiration and motivation within all of us. Motivation isn’t something we need to “find”, it’s within all of us, we just have to slow down enough to listen.
In fact, giving our brain the space to rest and switch off from the repetitive thoughts of our daily lives has been proven to increase our overall feelings of focus and motivation. As Ferris Jabr states in his article for Scientific America, “downtime replenishes the brain’s stores of attention and motivation”. While Ferris Jabr’s article explores the notion of mental downtime from many perspectives, meditation is one way we can achieve mental rest which in turn helps us regain a sense of personal motivation.
So, if your heart is calling for more motivation and inspiration in 2023, meditation techniques such as visualisations, mantra and affirmations are a wonderful way to connect to a sense of inspiration and motivation in your practice. You may also like to keep a journal handy when you meditate for that next great idea that pops into your mind during your moment of stillness.
3. Meditation for creativity and play
Allowing our meditation practice to be fun and playful is a supportive way to enrich our practice. While meditation can be a place to honour the deepest parts of us, it can also be a time to connect back to your inner sense of wonder, creativity and play.
Perhaps you remember the last time you were creative and how wonderful that felt? Or, you may have memories as a child of running around and exploring nature without any sense of time. These are just some of the qualities that can be cultivated through meditation.
Meditation, and the range of techniques on offer goes far beyond what you may believe as a silent practice on the mat. In fact, it can be full of movement, sound, colour, and a place where creativity is cultivated.
In his book Mindfulness for Creativity, Danny Penman argues that mindfulness meditation and other mindfulness practices can help the brain switch to divergent thinking, a type of thinking that is unstructured and one which supports the production of innovative ideas or solutions – essentially the state your brain is in when creativity is flowing.
Meditation techniques such as drawing meditation and dance meditation are wonderful for connecting you back to a sense of creativity and play. Why not let yourself get lost in the colours on a page or the beat of a drum?
4. Meditation for holistic wellbeing
Over the last few decades there has been much research conducted that identifies and proves the holistic benefits of a meditation practice. While we have explored above many emotional benefits of meditation there are indeed many physiological and mental health benefits that can also be experienced. In fact, meditation is a great way to tend to your holistic wellbeing as it can support each aspect of your health from mental, emotional, and physical.
Some of the science based benefits of meditation as outlined by Harvard Health, notes “new research findings continue to highlight the health benefits of regular meditation, including improvements in cardiovascular health, anxiety, depression, gastrointestinal conditions, and insomnia.” The article goes on to further explain, “there is even some evidence that meditation changes your brain, enlarging areas of brain tissue that help us think and learn, while decreasing areas that cause us stress and anxiety.”
Meditation supports a mind-body connection not only on an emotional level but on a physiological level that can support overall health and wellbeing.
Meditation techniques such as mindfulness, awareness-based practices, nature-based practices (where the dual benefits of the practice and being in nature can be felt) as well as mindful movement are wonderful ways to support your physiological wellbeing with meditation.
So if you’re ready to start the year off with a fresh outlook, new perspective and a whole heap of joy then meditation may be exactly what you’re looking for. And the final piece of great news? You don’t have to meditate for hours each day to experience these wonderful benefits, even 20 minutes a day can be enough.
Happy meditating in 2023!
At ACMM we can support you to refresh your life through our range of teacher training programs and our extensive list of electives that you can choose from. Our courses take you on a personal and professional journey leading to professional membership with Meditation Australia.
Find out if our courses are the right fit for you. Book a Zoom Discovery Call with us today!
Blog by ACMM Coach Sammy Wynn
