Meditation completely transforms a person. It makes life more interesting, because as you evolve faster than the world around you, every day you look at it with new perspective. It feels like you are getting back to your childhood – you see this mountain, and this lake for the first time and you feel this excitement, joy of life. Meditation revives, improves and transforms you. Although, very few people are able to withstand on the path of spirituality. Many people hear about meditation, some start practicing it, fewer people make meditation their regular practice, and only a handful of people reach high meditations, high goal and get realization.

We have come up with five tips to help the beginners integrate this powerful practice into their lives.

Regularity is more important than intensity. There is such a thing that we can describe as meditation flow. Our whole life is spent in a certain state of mind: there are mean people, kind people, caring people, there are calm and anxious ones. A regular twice a day meditation takes a person into another state. If you have meditated in the morning, your mind becomes more intuitive, and you take decisions that are more effective. You are in a positive mood and have better connections with other people. You are more loving, humane, more understanding. And it prevents many conflicts which might consume huge amounts of your time and energy. That is why it is important to meditate in the morning.

The second time you meditate in the evening. After work your morning meditative state is completely gone. You are overwhelmed by the emotions of the day. If you do not change this state of mind and go to bed, the whole night you are going to be in that restless flow. If you meditate right after work or at least before going to bed, you will ‘restart’ this flow and will return to calm, peaceful state of mind. You will spend your evening in this pleasant state and will go to bed. By meditating every morning and evening, you will be evolving, growing, gaining control of the emotions, immersing deeper into intuition layers.
That is why you should set a rule for yourself, and it should be critical for you: meditate twice a day without any compromise. “I have quitted many habits, but this one I am not going to quit; I will meditate twice a day”.
You may move to this goal gradually. For example, at first promise yourself to meditate twice a day for two weeks. Maybe after these two weeks you will promise yourself to meditate regularly for a whole month. And one day, when you are ready, tell yourself this: “I will meditate twice a day throughout all my life”.

Some people can get very deeply involved. For example, they watch a video, get inspired and decide to meditate right away, and do it for too long a time. But first, you should get used to meditation. Your willpower and psychic ‘muscles’ should take shape and the spiritual power should strengthen. It is similar to physical training – if you do too many push-ups or sit-ups, but you have never done so much exercise before, the whole body will hurt for the next three days. You will not even be able to walk without pain, let alone sit-ups and push-ups.

The same thing with meditation: you should train your willpower ‘muscle’ all the time. Take a commitment: “I am going to meditate for 5 minutes”. If you would like to start with 20 minutes, you will feel inner resistance, which is not going to be there if you do 5 minutes. When the timer goes off, and you feel like you want to meditate some more, since something interesting has just begun, you can continue. Start with 5 minutes in the mornings and in the evenings, and in a week add 1 minute more and do 6 minutes in the mornings and evenings, and in a week – 7 minutes.

Let’s assume you got to 30 minutes meditations and you feel resistance: “Oh, I have to meditate 30 minutes, but it is hard for me”. It means that it is too much and you should reduce your time by 1 minute. So, you start meditating for 29, 28, 25 minutes, but then you feel that 25 minutes is not enough. Then you start increasing the time of meditation. In this way you will find your perfect time for meditation.
The minimum time recommended for an advanced practitioner is 20 minutes, average time recommended for meditation is 30 minutes, and after 30-40 minutes you can feel a powerful meditative flow. But you should go gradually, reasonably evaluating your capabilities. “Do not bite off too big piece of an apple, that you might choke on. Bite of the piece that you can swallow”.

There is a rule: no meditation – no food. Treat breakfast as a reward for your meditation. And in this way meditation might become something desirable. Moreover, the meal taken after meditation appears to be much more enjoyable, that is because your mind is calm, and your perception of tastes, smells, etc. is much deeper and vivid.

I would recommend you to practice a system of meditation that will lead you to the realization of your life goal. The eight limbs of yoga were formulated about two and a half thousand years ago, and each of the limbs develops certain layers of the mind. In accordance with human psychology, there was created a practice, which develops each layer: conscious, subconscious, superconscious. And such a system works most harmoniously.

There are many relaxation techniques, like breathing meditation and so on. They are good techniques, but they do not provide complete development, practicing them you will not achieve the goal of your life. Meditation Steps project provides a basic course on meditation technique, which introduces a holistic system of lessons that will lead you to realization of your life goal. There are many good tips on how to establish yourself in the practice of meditation. The technique is very important. For example, when you are going to participate in the Dakar Rally, you need to choose a car that can take you to your destination and is not going to fall apart on the way, a car that has all the necessary characteristics for this. So, choosing the right meditation technique is very important.

It is ideal to find 4-5 people, who practice the same meditation technique, and meet to meditate together at least once a week, because collective meditation creates spiritual energy.

When you have a lot of physical energy, you want to run and jump. When intellectual energy is abundant, one wants to be creative, invent something, plan. And when there is spiritual energy, you want to meditate. Even if five people meditate together, a subtle atmosphere, a powerful spiritual flow is created. By collective effort, resonance, by everyone’s attempt, a large amount of spiritual energy is created. And then during the week everyone has a desire to meditate. Therefore, try not to skip the collective meditation.