Guided Meditation With Rod Stryker
To meditate mindfully requires an experience full of open, present and non-judgmental thinking. In return, it helps you experience the richness of every moment, by focusing on staying in the present. Through gentle controlling of your attention, this practice has a profound effect on your body by decreasing depression, improving heart health, balancing hormones, and even changing brain chemistry.
This month, research from Biological Psychiatry showed that meditation can rewire the brains of ordinary people like you and me…not jut monks who spend hours a day meditating.
The study followed a group of unemployed people who were looking for work, and experiencing high stress levels. The group was split up into two parts…one group practiced formal meditation and mindfulness. The other group did stretching exercises while talking and joking, and were instructed to ignore the way their body was feeling.
The meditative group not only were able to better handle the stress of unemployment, but their brain scans also improved. The scans showed increased communication among the parts of the brain related to stress and the parts that process calm and focused reactions. Plus, four months after the study, the researchers showed that even those who had stopped meditating had lower levels of unhealthy inflammation, likely due to the positive changes in the brain.
Before you begin your day, focus on your inner voice, and spend a few minutes quieting the mind and re-wiring your brain with this 5-min guided meditation video. By calming the nervous system and improving circulation, this practice can smooth emotional hills and valleys into a level path while revitalizing your energy flow.
I developed this with Rod Stryker, one of the preeminent yoga and meditation instructors in the United States. (Clip from the Yoga Sculpt DVD).
