Meditations for Every Mode

Roundup: Meditations for Every Mode

There is now ample scientific research that proves something meditation practitioners have suspected for millennia – that meditation has myriad powerful benefits on our brains and bodies. 

Here are some of the studied, proven benefits you can look forward to with a consistent meditation practice:

• Meditation helps calm down our “monkey mind” (our mind’s tendency to wander, which is associated with decreased happiness, worry and anxiety)
• Meditations’ effects rival those of antidepressants and has been shown to reduce anxiety, including social anxiety
• Meditation physically increases the volume of our brains, particularly in the areas responsible for learning, memory, and emotional regulation
• Studies show that meditation even helps slow down aging brains
• A number of studies show that meditation can help with addictive behavior and with preventing relapses

With all of these promising results, we frequently encourage patients to add meditation to their holistic weight loss or self-care journeys. 

The key to receiving these benefits, though, is consistency.  Just like physical muscle can only be built through consistency (e.g. going to the gym a few times a week, not just once a month), you’ll generally only gain meditation’s benefits by consistently meditating.  Try meditating for 1 minute 5x a week to start, building up to 5 minutes daily as your practice grows.

Another key: finding meditations you love.  There are millions of meditation teachers, styles and genres to choose from – it’s wonderful to have choice, but it can be overwhelming!

Below, we’ve pulled together some of our favorite FREE meditations across the internet* for every mood, need and mindset.  The meditations we’ve curated are all guided, though you can certainly practice meditating on your own, unguided. 

Self-Confidence/Self-Love

• Self-Love for the Feminine – a moving and beautiful meditation that helps embrace all parts of you. Despite its title, this is not only for women meditators – it’s for everyone.
• Quick Confidence – a short boost of confidence led by a teacher with a soothing, calming voice.
• Loving Yourself: An Energetic Transmission – a 7-minute body scan plus positive affirmation meditation that helps connect you to a sense of positivity and self-love.

Boost of Positivity and Focus

• Hypnotic Journey to Weight Loss by Lauren Archer (in SMWL app à resources à audio files)
• The Heart of Centering by Lauren Archer (in SMWL app à resources à audio files)
• Gratitude – one of my personal favorites, and one of the shortest on this list at 5 minutes. I meditate to this track at least twice a week and it nearly always brings joyful tears to my eyes!
• Quick Calm – a short form of body scan meditation to move you from anxious to calm in just 5 minutes.
• 5 minute meditation – another body scan meditation that’s effective in bringing you back into calm, energetic focus.

Sleep Meditations

• Yoga Nidra Stairway to Heaven – another deeply relaxing, uplifting, meditation to help you fall asleep at night. Yoga Nidra meditation can also be used mid-day or anytime you need a break – it’s said that a short Yoga Nidra practice (usually between 30 and 45 minutes) gives you the equivalent sense of rest of 2-4 hours of sleep.
• Guided Relaxation for Weight Loss – this is technically a hypnosis track, meant to be listened to as you drift into a calming, relaxed state. It functions in a similar way as does meditation, putting you in a deeply calming mindset “whereby you can finally accept and wholly embrace all of the positive, protective energies that your own healthy body is craving.”  I personally found this to be a powerful addition to my practice.  You may want to listen to it with a pair of comfortable headphones or even a sleep mask with embedded Bluetooth speakers so that you can drift off to sleep without interruption.
• Heal While you Sleep with Binaural Beats – while this meditation is designed to help you drift off to sleep, it also includes two powerful additions: positive affirmations, which help boost self-confidence, and binaural beats, which trigger the brain to relax even more deeply. To get the benefit of the binaural beats, it’s critical to listen to this particular meditation with headphones.
• Floating in the Stars – fall asleep to the feeling of floating in the stars, as the title suggests. The background music and the voice of the meditation teacher are incredibly soothing.

Rituals/Other

• Bath meditation – lovely to listen to as you’re taking a bath. It’s 8 minutes long, but it makes your bath feel like a luxurious ritual.
• Longer bath meditation – this one is a bit longer at 18 minutes, giving you even more time to savor and be mindful.
• Full moon practice for clearing and letting go – this meditation is meant to be practiced either on the day of the full moon, or up to three days pre- or post. It’s a powerful practice to tap into each month to reconnect with what energizes you and what you may need to shed.
• Future-self meditation – this genre of meditation is based in visualization, which can be challenging for some. It is powerful, though, especially when on a longer journey with big goals, like a health or weight loss journey.  A future-self meditation is not aimed at “revealing” who you’ll be in the future like a crystal ball; rather, it helps you crystallize your vision more solidly, work through some of the blockers you’re encountering, and perhaps see your journey in a new light.  There are two versions I use and love, linked below.  I recommend listening to them and then journaling for 5-10 minutes afterward, free-writing to simply let yourself note down everything you felt, noticed and thought. 
  • Jessica May Tang’s version—I really enjoyed this one. It’s got a bit more visualization in it.
  • Bri Seeley’s version – lighter on the visualization, heavier on the dialogue between you and your future self.

What’s your favorite meditation you’ve come across?  Please share it with us in comments below!

*note: a number of meditations linked here are sourced from Insight Timer, an app with tens of thousands of FREE meditations you can listen to directly on any internet-connected device.  While SMWL is not affiliated with Insight Timer, we love, use and recommend this app highly.  We also include meditations from YouTube, and, of course, from our own SMWL app.

Author

Sarah Eno Sarah Eno is passionate about supporting healthy lifestyle and mindset change. She graduated with a degree in Functional Nutrition in 2016. She has supported hundreds of individuals to a health-promoting lifestyle and believes that everyone has the opportunity to experience health. Sarah is a wife and mom of 3 boys. She loves cross-country skiing, yoga, her Peloton, and does fashion runway part-time.