If you are stuck in a cycle of negative thinking, it can feel impossible to overcome it. Stress, worry, and anxiety can have massive impacts on mental health by disrupting thought patterns and interfering with our lives.
If you are looking for a method to reprogram your negative thinking, guided meditation is an excellent tool to help reverse your habits. Through guided meditation, people can seek inner peace and gain better control over their negative thinking for relaxation, stress relief, and peace of mind. As a bonus, guided meditation is a great way for beginners to explore meditation as it involves leadership from a teacher to perform.
Begin any guided meditation session by setting your intentions.
Before you even turn on your guided meditation app or walk into your teacher’s meditation studio, determine what you want to achieve from your guided meditation session before it begins.
When you enter your session with a clear picture of what you want, you’ll be able to focus on it as the instructor leads you into a state of relaxation. You don’t need to have a big, complicated goal for the session–you can keep it as simple as “I want to steady my breathing” or “I want to feel a little calmer than I do now.” Baby steps turn into the foundation for reprogramming your mind toward more positive, relaxed thinking.
Use your guided meditation time to really get in touch with your emotions.
Emotions are complicated. Often, when we think we feel one way about a situation, we end up having multiple emotions swirling together to make one confusing mix of feelings. This can really mess with our minds. Instead of taking a moment to really process and understand emotions, we allow them to overcome us, which often leads to negative thinking cycles. Or, as Psychology Today points out, some people do the exact opposite and repress their emotions rather than experiencing them. Either method can lead to serious upset and damage to our minds.
During your guided meditation, as you begin to relax your body and open your mind, sit with your emotions, and break them down into specific parts. Often, big emotions such as anger or sadness are often accompanied by others, such as grief, jealousy, or frustration. When you can identify separate emotions and truly get in tune with your mind and body, you can begin to accept and learn to work with how they affect your mind.
Use guided meditation to help you determine what you really want for yourself.
When you think about what we want for yourself in the future, you might have a hard time really visualizing what you truly desire for yourself. Whether you have a negative self-image or a hard time determining which pathway you want to take, getting your mind to focus on yourself can be a challenge.
Group Meditation
Depending on the situation you are facing in your personal life, you may want to consider group guided meditation. This is remarkably similar to the guided meditation mentioned above, in which a guide walks you through the meditation process, however group guided meditation is generally completed in a room with other people around. This may seem a bit weird at first, but you will find that some of these people are going through similar situations that you are in your own life.
And having a social group surrounding you as you meditate can help you feel supported and loved—which may be especially important if you are dealing with something like the loss of a loved one.
Final Thoughts
Guided meditation can help you reach a comfortable balance between your mind and body to allow yourself that opportunity to explore potential pathways in a safe environment. Guided meditation is often used in tandem with other practices, such as visualization.
By using guided meditation to relax your thoughts and your body, you can open a great space for your mind to explore different pathways you envision yourself taking. Trying to imagine yourself accomplishing a huge goal can seem fuzzy and impossible to imagine, but during guided meditation, the fog is lifted. Your mind is free to wander down different pathways to allow yourself a chance to see yourself as the person you really want to become.
