At plant-based4health.com, we embrace holistic healing practices, which address all parts of an individual – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. For optimum health and well-being, we recommend that you consider adopting a whole-food, plant-based diet (which helps in the prevention of chronic illnesses and can reverse cancer, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes) and exercise regularly. In addition, we suggest that you experiment with meditation, ideally making it a lifelong daily practice.

What is meditation?
Meditation is taking time to sit in silence, relax, breath and go inward. Although it is based in spirituality and numerous world religions, you do not need to have any particular belief system to meditate effectively.

The benefits of meditation
People have been meditating for thousands of years for spiritual contemplation and enlightenment. But recent scientific studies now provide evidence that meditation offers a multitude of physical, mental and emotional benefits including a heightened sense of well-being, improvements in brain function and a slowing of the aging process. Through meditation you will raise the vibration of your body and energy field which allows for healing. See our page How your thoughts and emotions influence your health.

How to get started
A simple form of meditation is to sit alone (preferably in a quiet room) with your feet flat on the floor. Then close your eyes and begin breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth. Relax your jaw, neck and shoulders. Try to keep away any distracting thoughts and if they do come in, simply acknowledge them without judging and focus back on your breathing. Do this for 5 to 10 minutes as a start and build from there.

There are many types of meditation including the breath meditation described above. These include walking meditation, Primordial Sound Meditation (PSM) in which you silently recite a personalized sound or mantra, Transcendental Meditation, Mindfulness Meditation, and guided meditations which often use visualizations. An excellent 7-minute guided meditation that is available for free on YouTube is Connecting to Source by Caroline Cory of OMnium Universe. If you do this in the morning and again in the evening each day for 30 days, you will lock in a routine. Experiment from there. There are many other meditations to explore on OMnium Universe, Universal SoulSpa, and Wendy von Oech.com. 

Keep with it. The benefits are worth it.
Don’t get discouraged if you start a meditation practice and then stop. With any new lifestyle change, setbacks happen. Be kind to yourself, recognize that it’s normal to feel a bit anxious about the process and then start up again. Try to stick with a regular routine such as waking 15 minutes earlier in the morning and meditating then and again when you get home from school or work in the evening or right before bed. It is also a practice that has compounded benefits. The more you do it, the easier it gets and the more you experience the benefits in your daily life.

Enjoy the process, give yourself time and soon the mind chatter will diminish and you’ll savor the peace and solitude that meditation brings, along with its multitude of benefits.