Meditation pillow

Meditation has helped me so much with my menopausal symptoms and life in general, in fact has become something of a family thing over the last year

Meditation has helped my family with the struggle with hormone changes, academic stress, anxiety and panic attacks even sleep problems, its shown me its beneficial to all ages and definitely been a big factor to why my family are doing so

much better.

MEDITATION BENEFITS

I'm sure you have read a lot about how beneficial meditation is when practiced regularly as its being talked about a lot ; from concentration: helping you become more focused , reduces anxiety, stress even loneliness and over thinking: helping change the way we process our thoughts which is the main cause of most of our problems . The younger you learn how to meditate the bigger the long term advantages in making changes to your lifestyle and having 2 teenage daughters who have both used it over the last year has made me realize what an important life skill meditation is and how it needs to be taught in schools .

HOW I DISCOVERD MEDITATION

I started meditating over 20 years ago, At the age of 14 I was attacked by 7 girls walking home one night ,this lead to me suffering with extreme panic attacks for a lot of years and not wanting to go out at night, my friends and family tried everything to help me, one of the things I tried was yoga , at the end of one of the class I went to the instructor would put on a tape' YES A TAPE ' that's how long ago it was. She got us to imagine being in a rowing boat sailing down a river, you could hear the water lapping up against the boat, birds in the trees I felt relaxed and safe which I hadn't felt in a long time, this become my favorite part of the class and every week I would find myself being the only one left laying on my mat.

I loved it so much I bought a meditation cd and started practicing at home I finally started to leave the house at night like a normal 20 year old. As life got more busy it become something I stopped doing and once you have children finding a quite 5 mins to have a cup of tea is hard enough, let alone being able to sit in silence with your thoughts.

I've spoke a lot about my menopausal symptoms and the one I have struggled with the most is my Anxiety which lead me to have panic attacks like I had years ago. I started yoga again to help with them and one of the yoga courses I enrolled in was a 21 day course , at the end of each class the yoga instructor would get us to count our breaths, breath in for 4, hold for 4, out for 4 after a few days she would lengthen to 6 then 8 breaths. the first time I noticed I was doing it when not in class was when I was running late while driving to an appointment and every traffic light I came to was on red, I could feel myself getting more stressed I found myself counting my breaths at every stop light. By the time I arrived at my appointment I felt really calm, with doing the breathing exercises every day for a long period of time I had trained my breathing into a new rhythm which had calmed me down and probably stopped a panic attack. After that I noticed I was doing it more and more and my panic attacks happened less and less. This also made me look at my yoga practice differently I'd been thinking so much about doing the poses correctly and wanting to look like the Instagram yoga girls I didn't realise the breath work was as beneficial, maybe more so than the exercising. When doing yoga now I like to try to do it with my eyes closed as much as possible which helps me concentrate on my breathing.

Breath work is the starting point with meditation' TO BE ONE WITH YOU BREATH is a perfect quote, because once you can do that your never alone and things don't seem so scary and that's what meditation has taught me, its also a skill you can take with you wherever you go it can help you though all parts of your life it helped me 20 years ago and I really feel its helping me again .

Over the next few months I'm going to share with you how meditation has helped different members of my family and different techniques I've tried. Thank you for reading my post please subscribe if you think meditation could help you as meditation has helped me find zen in my house of hormones.