If you find yourself struggling to find peace and understanding in your daily life, it might be time to adapt some meditation practices. Meditation is a wonderful way to relieve stress and tension, center yourself, and focus on your mind, body, and spirit.
Meditation on its own is a way to clear your mind of your stresses and worries, and find that inner peace you have been looking for.
, but today we are going to be talking about the Rainbow Meditation Technique.This guided meditation technique is going to give your meditation practice a little more structure.
The Rainbow Meditation Technique
In order to get started, many natural health practitioners recommend that you take your time to read through the instructionsseveral times before you begin so that you can be familiar with the order.
The first thing that you want to do, is visualize a rainbow in the sky. Be sure that you can envision all of the colors of the rainbow as vividly as possible. After you have the colors firmly fixed in your mind, you can begin the meditation process.
- Red – Root Chakra
Take a breath and be sure that it is a complete and deep breath. While you are inhaling, picture the color red in your mind. At functional medicine Glendale, we teach that this color symbolizes the tension in your body, especially in your spine. Exhale and release the tension that you are holding in your body.
- Orange – Sacral Chakra
Take a breath and picture the color orange in your mind. Orange is your current emotional state. Slowly exhale, and center yourself emotionally.
- Yellow – Solar Plexus
Take a deep breath slowly, and as you fill your lungs, see the color yellow in your mind. The color yellow here is your solar plexus chakra, where you are going to improve your self-awareness and confidence.
- Green – Heart Chakra
Picture the color green in your mind as you slowly inhale. As you draw in air, imagine peacefulness, or something that reminds you of peace. The green is your inner peace, expressing what you feel in your heart. Exhale.
- Blue – Throat Chakra
Imagine the color blue. Begin inhaling slowly as you picture the blue very clearly. The blue is the love within you. Love surrounds and fills you. When talking about chakras, this can also be for your throat when imagining your voice and what you can do with it.
- Indigo – Third Eye
Breath deeply, and take a slow inhaling breath. As you inhale, visualize the indigo. The indigo is your secret self. Exhale slowly as you reflect.
- Violet – Crown Chakra
As the final level, it’s can be good to spend a slightly longer amount of time with this one. Slowly begin to inhale. As you inhale, imagine violet. This is the level of your most vulnerable and secret self, as it represents what it is in your mind and subconscious.
Exhale slowly, continuing to reflect on your vulnerable and intimate feelings. At functional medicine Sherman Oaks, we believe this is a place of true inspiration and honest creativity.
Slowly release yourself as you continue breathing deeply. Your body should feel better from the release of tension from the multiple levels of your mind.
At this time, you can begin to see the color of the rainbow in the opposite order as you rise from the depths of your mind and emotions. Say the names in your mind as you travel up and out, Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, and release. Envision your body as having been cleansed. Open your eyes, and begin the refreshed part of your day.
3 Benefits of Meditation
After looking at many of the practices that appear in many cultures, researchers decided that they should actually get together and take a closer look at many of these beliefs about the power of meditation, and the information that they collected probably surprised them to a large extent.
- It Reduces Stress
Stress is a bad thing in basically all instances. This is because when people are stressed out, their body is working on a much less efficient level than normal. Some of this is due to the hormone cortisol, which can trigger all sorts of harmful effects like inflammation, high blood pressure and anxiety. Those symptoms can in turn create other problems that lead to difficulty sleeping, which can cause a cyclical effect. Any form of reducing stress can be life-saving, and many studies done on meditation have even noted that reduced stress has a powerful effect on diseases like IBS.
- Improves Your Attention Span
When you meditate, one of the key factors that you will see is a noticeable increase in your ability to observe, record and recall information. These three factors are at the forefront of being sure that you can complete tasks without being constantly distracted by things. Studies have shown that workers who spend time meditating in the morning tend to be distracted less, and are able to zip back to tasks at hand more quickly if they did become distracted. At functional medicine Encino, we highlight research showing that the workers were also able to recall steps to their tasks more clearly than the workers who didn’t participate in the meditation periods. Through the study, it was also remarked that some people showed major signs of improvement in as little as 5 days, so you won’t know what you can accomplish until you try it yourself.
- Reduces Anxiety
A lot of the time, anxiety could be a response that is triggered by the physical effects of stress. The combinations of deep breathing, and slow self-consideration help to reduce the negative responses that shallow fast breathing can trigger. That can have a range of benefits for multiple type of anxiety disorders, panic attacks, and compulsive behaviors.
Several studies have concluded that improvements are not only possible, but also noted with 3 – 4 weeks of the newly introduced habit. Participants who continued the meditation noted that they were still seeing improvements in coping with anxiety at 12 weeks. This is really great news for people who suffer from anxiety and panic attacks, because many people who battle these disorders find themselves taking complex drugs that give them a host of side effects over time.