What is meditation and how we do it at Beyond and Above Sessions?

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What is meditation and how to go about it?
For many people meditation is a tool to achieve inner balance, be more focused and attentive or simply change or alter your state of mind.
Meditation has been one of many traditional techniques on different spiritual paths in different cultures. It has been associated with Eastern esotheric and religious practices by the Western Cultures.
In the recent decades it has become one of the psychotherapeutic techniques and used ever since.
You can practice it independently and in a group.

What are the types of meditation?
There are many but the ones that are the most popular and known are:
- Concentrative meditation - when you focus on a specific object or goal and tuning yourself out of everything else. It is to experience things that you focus on- your breathing pattern, a visualisation, a mantra, or anything else.
- Mindfulness meditation - it involves Mindfulness-based stress reduction and Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Mindfulness can target to help and tackle different types of problems and issues such as depression or anxiety for instance. The focus here might be going from one practice to another. It involves staying aware, being open, attentive.

What are the benefits of meditation?
Research has shown that meditation can have both physiological and psychological effects. Some of the positive physiological effects include
 a lowered state of physical arousal, reduced respiration rate, decreased heart rate, changes in brain wave patterns and lowered stress.

Some of the other psychological, emotional, and health-related benefits of meditation include:

- Increased self-awareness
- Better stress management skills
- Improved emotional well-being
- Better management of symptoms of conditions including anxiety disorders, depression, sleep disorders, pain issues, and high blood pressure.
- Improvement in working memory and fluid intelligence
- Changes in different aspects of attention
- Consciousness is often likened to a stream,
shifting and changing smoothly as it passes over the terrain.
- Meditation is one deliberate means of changing the course of this stream, and in turn,
altering how you perceive and respond to the world around you.
- While experts do not yet fully understand exactly how meditation works,
research has clearly demonstrated that meditative techniques can have a range of positive effects on overall health and psychological well-being.

Beyond and Above presents a blend of different breathing techniques, easy to learn and remember, both for beginners and advanced. They are used as an introduction to focus on positive thinking and helping you to change your habits in a subtle way to give yourself care and love you deserve.
We use techniques of visualisation to help you to focus.
All this accompanied by live Tibetan singing bowls and background relaxation music and visuals.

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