Tips: How to Overcome 12 Barriers to Meditation

The New Year encourages many of us to take up self-improvement activities as resolutions - and meditation is perennially popular.

Tom Evans, author of The Zone: How to Get In It and Stay In Itsays, "By spending nine minutes meditating every day, the benefit of the time saved can be tenfold. Every minute spent meditating adds another to your life."

However, it is easy to make excuses not to meditate regularly.

Tom says: "It is often the people who could gain the most from meditation who make the most excuses not to try it."

Tom has put together a list of the 12 most common perceived barriers to meditation, listed below:

1. You don’t have the time
Tom Evans says that meditation reduces stress, and makes us less prone to illness, so any time spent comes back many times over by reducing time spent off.

2. You can’t make your mind go quiet
Meditation is not so much about having no thoughts as it is about forming a different relationship with them. When we are kinder to our thoughts, they are kinder to us.

3. You have to be in a quiet room
We can meditate when out walking, commuting or painting the shed. It is easy to integrate meditative practices into what we think of as our busy lives.

4. You have to have your eyes closed
If you ever drive home on ‘autopilot’ on a familiar route, you have entered a light meditative state. We are all natural meditators.

5. It will take years of study
Learning to meditate is easy. It only takes ten minutes a day for a week to get the hang of it.

6. You have to study with a master
Put ‘free meditation’ into Google and get your ‘master’ to come to you.

7. It conflicts with your religious beliefs
Meditation is agnostic. Reciting of prayers, or responses to a celebrant, induces a light state of meditation.

8. It’s dangerous and you might lose your mind
The person who is meditating remains in control at all times. In the same way nobody else can breathe for you, nobody else can meditate for you.

9. There are no practical benefits
Lightbulb moments come to us when we enter the meditative state. Your next bright idea is just one meditation away.

10. People will think that you have joined a cult
When people notice how radiant and vibrant you are, they might ask if they can ‘join’ too.

11. You have to make time every day
Just meditating once or twice a week is enough to bring untold benefits. When we see it as a treat of some Me Time, it becomes a pleasure not a chore.

12. You don’t know how to start
Tom has put together a free nine-minute Be Calm meditation to help you begin. It introduces the three most common ways to enter the meditative state.

“Now you know that you can get started for free, in the comfort of your own home, what’s stopping you?” concludes Tom.

Links and previous related posts
The Zone: How to Get In It and Stay In It
http://www.tomevans.co/
http://www.badwitch.co.uk/2014/11/review-mindful-london-find-calm-in-city.html
http://www.badwitch.co.uk/2015/01/review-make-your-own-rules-diet.html
Twitter: @thebookwright