your secret to success & happiness


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MEDITATION:

YOUR SECRET TO SUCCESS & HAPPINESS If it works for Katy Perry and Eva Mendes, we wanna try it. Here’s how meditating every day can change your life... forever.

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rom A-list actress Nicole Kidman to business mogul Arianna Huffington, women at the top of their games appear to share one habit – and that’s getting their ommm on. It’s not so surprising when you consider all the amazing mental and physical benefits of meditation. Reducing stress and anxiety, it lowers blood pressure and gets you more in tune with your body. Eva Mendes believes “meditation really helps create not only a sense of balance... but serenity and a calm state of mind,” while Girls boss Lena Dunham reveals she’s been meditating since the tender age of nine. “Meditation has made it possible for me to weather certain challenges and storms that I didn’t ever imagine would be in my life,” she recently revealed.

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Want to try it on for size? The good news is you don’t need to spend hundreds on a course or have the Dalai Lama on speed dial. Especially since Andy Puddicombe has been there, done that and made an app. At the age of 22, Andy moved to a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayas and became a monk. A decade later he returned to the UK with one wish; to demystify meditation. He created Headspace (www. headspace.com), an app that provides courses of guided meditations that don’t take forever to master. “Just 10 minutes meditation every day over a sustained period can have a huge impact,” he explains. “It can help to reduce feelings of Meditation stress and anxiety, improve your sleep, can even help enhance productivity at work, improve relationships as your physical performance in sports we become more and even help to soften the edges patient, better in relationships as we become more patient, better listeners, and perhaps a listeners and a little kinder too.” little kinder Even better, science backs this up. too. “Research has shown how the brain responds to training like meditation; an effect called neuroplasticity. Meditation can cause certain parts of the brain associated with learning and memory to grow in size and those connected with stress and anxiety to shrink,” Andy says.

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Training your brain Still not sold on sitting cross-legged? According to psychotherapist Carolyn Sinnott (www.carolynsinnott.com), who leads meditation classes at the Monkstown Clinic, Dublin, practicing meditation every day will help you beat workplace stress and eventually make better decisions. “Meditation calms the nervous system, resulting in you feeling less stressed and anxious. Practicing meditation can strengthen your ability to focus, and of course this can be a great help to you in your professional, as well as personal life,” Carolyn says. “But it’s the added perspective we gain from learning to quiet our thoughts that will inspire the most change,” she adds. We can “Meditation develops the ‘observer’ part of our observe how awareness, so we notice our automatic responses to situations that may trigger uncomfortable feelings, much time we spend in the past like stress, anger and frustration. This means we have choice and can respond, rather than react to rehashing these situations,” Carolyn adds. things we can’t Not just a cure for workplace stress, regular change. meditation will help you feel more mindful and happy. “We can observe how much time we spend in the past rehashing things we can’t change. We’re less likely to live our lives on autopilot and as a result our everyday experiences can feel much richer, because we’re actually present for them,” she says. “I’m really feeling this temple.”

Picture courtesy of Vila

Chasing the calm Most meditations are concentrative, like in Headspace and yoga, meaning you’re guided through a series of breathing and mindfulness exercises to calm and focus the mind. For anyone who wants to take their practice further, Transcendental Meditation (TM), a fave with celebs like Katy Perry and Jennifer Aniston, involves sitting for 20 minutes twice a day, mentally repeating a specific sound assigned to you by a teacher, until you enter a trance. American studies have proven TM really does affect your brain, and you’ll only ever need to learn how to do it once, though a course costs around €600. So maybe leave this until you’ve given regular meditation a whirl. Carolyn says that maintaining a regular practice is key to gaining the benefits of meditation. “It’s said that it takes about 20 minutes for the mind and body to quieten. However, I always tell my students that any meditation at all is beneficial, even a few minutes a day,” she says. It’s common to get distracted, but Andy explains that’s a natural instinct we shouldn’t fight. “Mindfulness isn’t about stopping these unique and remarkable cognitive processes through sheer force of will; that would be to vastly underestimate the power of our instincts. What you’re aiming for is to spot when your mind has wandered off down one path or another, and be able to bring it back to the here and now.” S STELLAR.ie 113

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