What is the Basis of Guided Meditation?

Can guided meditation be the answer for today’s fast-paced society? Stress is becoming more and more a facet of life in the 21st century and different people cope with the tensions and traumas associated with modern life in different ways. Unfortunately, many of the answers people are turning to today to help them cope are not always healthy choices. Evidence of this can be clearly seen in the upsurge of drug abuse, increased alcohol misuse. Too many people, often the youngest of today’s society, being totally unable to cope with the everyday requirements that the pace of modern life generates. Many are poorly equipped to succeed in the face of the ongoing economic situation, mass unemployment, terrorism and all the other worries associated with living through such impediments of life. There is, however, a significant proportion of people looking into the benefits of guided meditation in a more positive attempt to cope with contemporary tension.

Many people associate meditation with practices observed by Eastern religions. However, rather than specifically a religious observance, meditation is more realistically a way of focusing your mind in order to concentrate on the deity you are preparing to offer worship to. That being said, meditation does not specifically need to have anything to do with religion per se: meditation is a means of quieting your mind, slowing your brain patterns so that you can utilize this technique as a way to relax your mind and body, obtaining benefits associated with this technique. Put another way, meditation is a technique that helps the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of your brain to work together.

Traditional meditation techniques are many thousands of years old. Once you have learned how to achieve meditation, you successfully release all the many thoughts that jam your brain, allowing a single thought to remain. This enables you to focus totally on this sole thought. As a learned technique, you focus on a specific sound or phrase that is known as a mantra or you focus solely on your breathing or on something referred to as a koan. This is defined as a riddle with no answer. Our brains are remarkably undisciplined and, even with experience and a refined technique, stray thoughts will continue to pop into your mind. This is something that you need to learn how to deal with, resolved through guided meditation.

There are various ways of learning the techniques necessary to invoke discipline into your brain. guided meditation could be through specific, step-by-step instruction using a pre-recorded audio tape, mp3 player or a live teacher relaying these instructions from the front of a class. One thing that all these instructions have in common is to teach the student of guided meditation how to alter their brain patterns from the beta state of consciousness that oscillates at between 14 to 21 cycles per second into the alpha state of consciousness that is recognized to oscillate from 7 to 14 cycles per second. It is the alpha state of consciousness that you normally exhibit when you feel yourself begin to fall asleep.