How to find your inner peace with meditation

This article is all about Visualisation Meditation – part one of a series called “How to find inner peace with meditation”.

Meditation is like magic. Like day-dreaming but with someone who guides you. Especially if you are a visual person, visualisation meditation is the one for you.

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What Science says

Science prove that meditation has many health benefits including: relief of anxiety and depression symptoms, improved relaxation, improved ability to cope with stress, increased self-confidence and overall greater emotional and physical wellness.

My experience with meditation

My first time meditating was quite intense. I was anxious for a while, my mental health went down weeks ago and I wanted to try something new. To remind myself that I was in control of my life. I always wanted to try out meditating, but never did cause it felt scary to be alone with my own thoughts. Especially with my negative ones. But on that day I did it. I search on youtube “meditation” and soon I clicked on a video. I closed my eyes, at first I felt very uncomfortable. But as I was focusing more and more on my breathing, it got better. In the end, as I was opening my eyes, I felt such a relieve. I felt so calm.

I started to research what types of meditation exist. I found out about visualisation meditation.

What is Visualisation?

Visualization, on its own, involves picturing in your mind the outcome of something before it’s happening, whether that’s a task or a opportunity at hand – such as getting on stage to speak before a large audience – or a sport about to be played.

headspace

It is time to trick your own mind! To all people who feel anxious (including me), we get to fight back now with the help of visualisation meditation. What do I mean by that? When I am very anxious, I am not living in the moment, my mind tells me what horrible things are out there in the world waiting for me or the worst thing that can possibly happen when I do x or y. I imagine all these things.

Now – what visualisation meditation makes so much fun is, while you are meditating your guide tells you what you should visualise. And that is all the good shit. So I would argue if you tend to overthink, tend to be anxious and tend to visualise something before it actually happens: please try out visualisation meditation.

The Different Techniques

There are many different Visualisation Techniques:

• Color Breathing: Imagination of the desired colour to washing over your body while breathing
• Loving-kindess Meditation: Picturing a person you love (could also be a pet) and focusing on sending feelings like peace, calm, joy or healing to them
• Progressive Muscle Relaxation: Tensing and then relaxing a group of muscles
• Guided Imagery: Visualizing a place where you feel content and calm
• Goals Visualization: Imagining yourself succeeding a goal

How to Meditate:

Find yourself in a comfortable position, whether it is laying down or sitting on a matt. Turn down any noises, make sure you are in a quiet place. And if this is not possible: take your headphones in and forget about the world. Also I really really would recommend to just look up visualisation meditation on youtube and then pick out one. Then just start.

Here is one of my fav’s:

Happy Meditation!

Sources:

https://www.headspace.com/meditation/visualization

https://www.healthline.com/health/visualization-meditation

Picture above by Pexels

All or nothing – A mindset of a perfectionist

When you are terrified of making a mistake – thats when perfectionism is knocking on your door. You ever wonder, what to do about and how to change your way of thinking? Grab yourself a tea, a coffee or whatever you want to drink and read all about it.

On being perfect

I am guilty of being a perfectionist! I want all or nothing. What I mean by that is: I either want my whole flat clean or I accept the mess I am living in. This example is not really harmful (beside the fact that my flat is messy af for days). But if you apply this mindset onto relationships, it can become quickly damaging. Or food, either eating healthy all the time or never. Lets not talk about the guilt when I plan to have a healthy eating day and then I am eating something, what I consider as, unhealthy. This is purely black- or white thinking (later more on that).

I don‘t know when it did happen, when I became so obsessed with being perfect and afraid of failure. I also got really high expectations of myself, slowly dying when I am not reaching them.

Even as I write this – I always ask myself „is this what I write good?“ More likely is it good enough? I pressure myself so often, like girl just have fun doing what you do. Just enjoy the experience, make faults, get better. Embrace your imperfections.

What is perfectionism?

Science say perfectionism is a personality trait „that makes life an endless report card on accomplishments or looks“. It is driven by internal pressures like harsh judgement. Someone who is a perfectionist sets unrealistically high expectations for themselves and other. They quick find mistakes or fault in others. Also they tend to procrastinate out of their fear of failure. Another thing: they look to specific people in their life for validation. So Science got me pretty right and accurate.

The manifestation of perfectionism

There are three different types of manifestation when speaking of perfectionism: self-oriented, other-oriented, socially-prescribed. Someone who has a self-oriented perfectionism is – as the name says – fully focused on themselves. There is an unrealistic desire to be perfect on oneself. Whereas the other-oriented perfectionism is all about imposing unrealistic standard of perfection on others. Socially-prescribed perfectionism means to perceive unrealistic expectations of perfection from others.

How to overcome perfectionism

The first step to overcoming is to be conscious about it. Simply acknowledge perfectionism.

Here are different examples of perfectionist thinking: Black- or White thinking, Catastrophic thinking, Probability overestimation or Should statements.

What now?

Then what now? Good you know that you are a perfectionist, now lets change your mindset. Not to say that it is easy. Everytime you have self-critical thoughts replace them with helpful or more realistic statements. Some examples of positive realistic statements are:

– It‘s okay if some people don‘t like me. No one is liked by everyone.

– I am doing my best. And this is enough.

– Making a mistake does not mean I‘m stupid or a failure.

Imperfectly okay

Look at the bigger picture: ask yourself, in the end, does it even matter? What is the worst that could happen? Will this matter tomorrow, in a week, in a year?

Practice being imperfect: upload an imperfect picture on instagram, send a message with mistakes in it, try a new restaurant (when you can again – not me crying right now cause where I live everything is closed) without searching how good it is.

Or in my case: leave a visible area in the house a little messy. And finally upload that first blog post, that you are so afraid to upload cause you want it to be perfect.

Do you have anything on your mind? Share your thoughts! Please comment down below!

Read more about it

Most of the information I got are from: https://www.anxietycanada.com/articles/how-to-overcome-perfectionism/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/perfectionism