In these challenging times of the novel cornonavirus, meditation can help reduce stress and other issues children and adults may be facing, local teachers of the practice say.
Jeremy Grace, a meditation teacher and the owner of Wildlight Wellness Collective in Winston-Salem, said meditation is 100% important right now.
“These practices have helped many other people be a little lighter in their faith and in their trust of what’s happening in the world and still be able to move forward,” Grace said.
When she gives talks, Lucinda Shore, a meditation guide and teacher in Winston-Salem, asks people what they want to talk about.
“Health problems have been the main thing that’s been coming up the most,” Shore said. “People are getting so stressed out they’re making themselves sick.”
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Sonal Chhawchharia, a meditation teacher in High Point, spoke of the importance of people learning to meditate at an early age.
“It’s good for everyone who can breathe,” Chhawchharia said. “I think children today need it more than ever. They are losing their smiles. They are born with adult-stressed genes.”
She is starting to see more people who have never meditated before.
"People are starting to put their feet in the water and are scared at the same time," she said.
Different takes
The practice of meditation has been around for thousands of years.
Grace, who also teaches meditation teachers, said there are many forms of meditation and many reasons why people meditate or should meditate.
“Meditation to me in its simplest form is a meeting with the mind,” Grace said. “It’s an internal meeting with ourselves.”
The meditations he teaches vary from visualization to what is called Yoga Nidra, which is like a sleep state meditation.
“It primarily is a body sensing and scan awareness practice usually done in a reclined position or completely flat on the back,” Grace said.
He said the practice helped him heal his spine when it was injured last year.
“It is wonderful for post-traumatic stress and different traumas that we face in our lives or things that we have ignored about ourselves,” Grace said.
Shore’s short answer when she defines meditation is that it is “listening to God, your higher self, the universe – whatever you believe is greater than you.”
She said her answers come from a space of spirituality because of a near-death experience she had following a head injury.
“That comes from no longer a belief but a knowing,” Shore said.
She uses guided meditations mostly to help people learn the basics, and does chants and mantras with people, but she also does various advanced meditations.
“My personal meditation is I like to do it the Buddhist way, which is the Pranayama where you just work with your breath and go into complete nothingness,” she said.
She said meditation is a practice that takes discipline and time, and is not a quick fix.
"I believe that meditation is a healing balm that brings you back into your own inner light, your own inner knowing," Shore said.
For Chhawchharia, meditation is doing nothing:
“You have to sit with intention and have to meditate. ... You use some breathing techniques to calm your mind down, bring your body and mind and your system to a space where you can meditate.Then it’s just letting go. It’s just doing nothing, not even focusing, not concentrating.”
In her workshops, different breathing patterns are taught, but the core one is the SKY Breath Meditation.
“It’s a rhythmic breathing style that is taught in a three-day workshop,” Chhawchharia said. “Then you can do it at your home. You don’t need any outside guidance.”
All three meditation teachers said “the breath” is always important when people meditate.
Chhawchharia said meditation is easy but people need to do it the right way, especially to control the monkey mind.
She added that a lot of people don’t know how to breathe properly.
Grace said he teaches Pranayama, a limb of yoga that focuses primarily on breath.
For meditation beginners, Shore suggested that they learn to breathe.
“I think your breath is the quickest tool to help you sink into stillness,” she said. “You just pay attention to your breath. If you breathe in for three seconds and you hold your breath for three seconds then you exhale out for six seconds.”
She also said observing or being in nature will help.
Many benefits
In addition to reducing stress, meditation can help promote relaxation, increase potential circulation and reduce hypertension in the body, Grace said.
“Psychologically, it invites an opportunity to be nonreactive, to trust the capacity to feel and to be in a state of 'OK' sitting with whatever comes up in the mind,” he said.
He has found that a lot of people feel lack, especially now, because some have lost jobs and are not able to work at full capacity.
“If you are a small business owner, you are not fully integrated into your financial earning potential,” Grace said. “I work with meditation coaching. I use the visualization of abundance and we stay with that until that individual really starts to feel it.”
Shore, who has been meditating for 40 years and does life coaching, said along with combating stress, meditation is a tool used to create more joy.
She said guided meditations could be beneficial to children. For example, they could meditate and have visual meditations that they are going to be OK with their classes on Zoom, that they are going to be able to have Zoom parties and find a way to socially connect with their friends, Shore said.
The meditation teachers encouraged people to meditate every day, even for one, five or 10 minutes.
“When you meditate, your mind is so much clearer. ... You take less time to do whatever you’re doing," Chhawchharia said. "Your production increases so you actually create time for yourself.”