5 Common Misconceptions About Meditation for Beginners

Meditation is a practical way to reduce stress. It can also help provide focus, concentration, and energy benefits.

The only problem with meditating is that many beginners find that the effort doesn’t seem to work for them. That outcome causes them to quit.

It is essential to know that several misconceptions exist about meditation. If you believe any of them, you’re more likely to avoid this healthy practice.

1. Meditation is misinterpreted.

We use meditation as a loose term to describe contemplation, thinking, or having a clear mind. If you attempt to achieve these outcomes and fail, it’s easy to give up. Meditating is a technique the provides rest, allowing you to observe instead of judge. You keep redirecting yourself.

2. People must meditate in specific ways.

You don’t need to repeat mantras, sit in the lotus position, or create a contemplation center for your meditating. The only requirement is your commitment to the process. You can sit, stand, lie down, take a walk, or even color pictures.

3. Individuals miss their meditative state.

You can meditate anywhere. Some people even say they take mini-meditation breaks when stuck in traffic! The goal is to relax the body while quieting the mind. Whenever you can achieve that result, you have a successful experience.

4. One meditating type isn’t better than others.

The only meditation effort that is better is the one that works for you. This practice is an individualized experience. We live in a competitive culture where everyone wants to find that edge where success is possible. What you need to do is figure out why you want to meditate, how to achieve that goal, and how long it takes to get there.

5. You miss the chance to feel at peace.

Meditation isn’t going to feel the same each day. You might feel energized after one session, relief after another, and even disappointed at times. Some individuals feel at peace while others become anxious that they’ve missed something. There isn’t a right or wrong outcome here – only the one you achieve.

The best thing you can do for your body while embracing meditation is to prepare for the experience. When you have items from Amazing Grass and Douglas Labs available at home, you can get ready for whatever your next meditating session may bring.

How to Build Up Low Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is more than a trend or a buzzword. It allows you to understand how others think and feel so that you can respond appropriately to each situation.

Although some people have high emotional intelligence levels naturally, it is a skill that you can build with practice. If you want to start improving personally and professionally in this area, here are the steps you can take to have a successful experience.

List of the Best Ways to Increase Emotional Intelligence

Respond to Conflict Instead of Reacting to It

People with high emotional intelligence stay calm when stressful situations occur. Instead of being impulsive, they take an analytical approach to the problem. Their goal is to find a resolution that works for everyone while avoiding potential conflict points.

Be Assertive With Your Communication

Assertive communication translates to confidence. You’ll earn respect for your expertise without seeming overly passive or aggressive.

Maintain Your Motivation

Emotional intelligence inspires self-motivation. Your attitude can motivate others to find the success they want. If you show what it takes to persevere, those actions serve as a standard for others to follow. That places you into a natural leadership position.

You can support this effort with product assets from brands like Davinci Labs or Premier Research Labs. 

Keep a Positive Outlook

Although negative attitudes seem beneficial because of how they attract others to you, that energy can infect your soul and fester into something unpredictable. When your focus is on growing emotional intelligence, it is necessary to guard your attitude. You don’t need to be an optimist, but it helps to strive toward positive outcomes.

Practice Your Self-Awareness

When you know who you are, what you can accomplish, and where you’ll be in five years, it is easier to pick up on like-minded progress. Your body language and emotions communicate specific results that can enhance communication skills.

Embrace the Idea of Constructive Criticism

People with high emotional intelligence can handle constructive criticism. They take the feedback as fuel to help them get better. They also know how to let go of the frustration that arises when unjustified negativity comes their way.

Building up low emotional intelligence takes time. If you make these ideas a priority in your life, you’ll start seeing improvements faster than you may realize.

How to Trust Again: What Does It Take to Put Faith in Others?

When someone hurts you, the need to get even can feel overwhelming.

The only problem with that reaction is that you can leave a lot of collateral damage in your wake. That’s why you might hear someone say that hurting people tend to harm others the most.

Once you get beyond that initial shock, a defensive mechanism starts. You decide that the best way to prevent getting hurt again is to stop trusting anyone except for yourself. 

You may put up physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual walls to block others out of your life. Although it feels lonely, that emotion is better than the pain someone else inflicts.

Learning how to trust again isn’t easy, but it is possible to do it.

Trust Yourself Again

A lack of trust in other people is often a reflection of low self-esteem or self-confidence. It says that you don’t know that you’ve got a handle on what life can throw your way. No one can make you feel anything without your permission to let them, which means you are always in control. Put yourself in the driver’s seat of your life.

Let Go of the Fear

People who abuse your trust don’t deserve a second thought. The only problem is that those individuals might be your singular focus point. People who cheat, take advantage of you, break your heart, or abandon you are toxic. Let them go. It is scary to meet new people because they might do the same, but those individuals deserve a fresh start.

Stay Put Where You Are

When someone has a history of people leaving them, it is challenging to put faith in a stranger. Why continue to go through love and loss when you can manage the days by yourself? If you stay put, it is easier to encourage others to do the same. You can’t control what other people do, so accept that sometimes life may pull you apart. That’s not your fault.

Earn Trust from Others

The issue you face with trust might reflect your guilt or regret from hurting someone else. Although cheating can devastate a relationship, the negative consequences can impact both individuals. You may need to prove to yourself that you can earn trust from others.

Trust can happen again, but it won’t appear like magic. You must push forward each day to earn it from yourself and others.

How to Get Rid of Guilt

Guilt happens after making a regrettable decision. Although it is an uncomfortable emotion to manage, it also shows that you have a consciousness that strives for balance.

Honest mistakes from harsh words, poor financial decisions, or cheating can trigger guilt. You might also experience this emotion for reasons beyond your control.

Although guilt should start the grieving mechanism, some people get stuck in it for a long time. When that happens, you might experience depression, changes to your eating habits, relationship stressors, and self-harm thoughts.

How can you get rid of guilt?

Test Your Reality Each Day

Guilt distorts personal perception. It suggests that your mistakes, real or perceived, are responsible for the current reality. Before you can work on this emotion, it is crucial to determine if it is valid. 

Forgive Yourself

Your mistake may have life-changing consequences. It may lead to a broken relationship, divorce, getting fired, losing custody of your children, or even jail time. Until you can admit to yourself that what you did was wrong, forgiveness will not come. You must acknowledge regret, understand the decision-making process, and create a plan never to duplicate the issue again.

After that step, attempt to make amends. It doesn’t matter if others accept or reject your offer because personal forgiveness comes from the effort.

Eliminate Invalid Guilt

Adopt new habits that enable you to let go of the guilt that likes to show up. Instead of apologizing for everything, be assertive when stressful situations come along. If you take on the blame that others create for themselves, make the conscious choice to stop doing that. All you’re doing is enabling their mistakes. If something isn’t yours to carry, let it go.

Embrace Your Spirituality

People find tremendous strength in their faith. You can meditate, follow a religion, study science, or spend time in the forest – everyone takes a different path to their spirituality. When you embrace this part of the soul, it is easier to gain a new perspective on what and how you feel.

Guilt can be devastating. It may serve as a warning at first, but it is not a penance you must bear eternally. When you can learn to forgive yourself and others, this emotion has less power over your life.

Ways to Build Self-Confidence

Confidence is a perfume that attracts great things to us, it is often said that confidence can open doors to the greatest of places. Self-confidence is tantamount to good self-esteem. A person that is devoid of confidence would not take chances that could potentially lead to a great life.

Taking chances and maximizing opportunities is one of the unique traits of humans, imagine you didn’t have the self-confidence to pursue your dreams and live your best life, would that not be a form of death? Also, imagine if you could find enjoyable ways to build your self-confidence and be on your way to living your best life, is that not something worth exploring? Well, that is what we are going to do in this article. 

Ways of Building Self Confidence

The recommendations we are going to explore in this article may seem simplistic but they work. Ways of building self-confidence might be as simple as learning an instrument or as tasking as seeing a life coach. 

Learning an Instrument

Rockstars are considered one of the most confident sets of people on the planet.  Learning to play an instrument as classic as a guitar or owning a vintage guitar that you know how to play is a great confidence booster. Learn how to play an instrument today, perform before an audience, and see your self-confidence soar. The process of learning how to play an instrument can calm your anxieties, help increase your cognitive abilities, and help your mood. Learning an instrument can be a complex process that tasks your cognitive process, this tasking can help you build new neural networks that would make you more confident in your ability to do things.

Learning how to play an instrument can make you feel less idle and less like a failure. When you learn an instrument you might be viewed by others as a cool person, think of those people that walk around with their classic vintage guitars, and how people pay them more regard, such positive feedback can help you get out of the doldrums and be more self-confident. Good cheer and applause from a number of people can be very powerful.

Most people that are not self-confident are often crippled with anxiety, this would make them overthink everything and worry needlessly, and this decreases their efficiency and makes them more anxious. This vicious cycle of anxiety can easily be broken by playing an instrument, it makes you calmer, less worried, and more efficient, invariably you would become more self-confident without anxiety holding you back. Furthermore learning how to play an instrument teaches you alternative ways of expressing yourself and expression helps build self-confidence.

Writing 

Writers are thinkers that express themselves and face their thoughts. Engaging in writing whether creative or otherwise can be a great way to face the issues preventing you from being as self-confident as you could be. Write out the things that hold you back from being your most self-confident self and seek to find remedies to them, if you do this, you would be on your way to building your self-confidence.

Meditating

Being self-conscious is being aware of yourself,  this is practically the first step you can take toward being a better version of yourself. Meditate, look into yourself to find yourself, when you do that you would discover who you are and the weaknesses you have. After identifying your weaknesses you can meditate more to find the root of those weaknesses. After discovering all of this you would be in a position to help mend yourself mentally and it would reflect through you as you become a more self-confident, self-aware individual.

Self-confidence is not impossible to have, try the ways explained above and see yourself improve.

Alternatives to Yoga That Are Great for Your Body

You want to take care of your body.

You get some exercise each day, eat healthy foods, and get enough sleep at night. Your cabinets are stocked with products from brands like Douglas Laboratories, Jarrow Formulas, and Pure Encapsulations.

You might even get in some stretching and resistance with yoga.

If you want to increase your movement without using yoga, here are some alternatives to consider trying. 

1. Climbing

Scaling a wall requires concentration on each muscle as you ascend. It targets each body area in the same way yoga does while letting you adapt to different circumstances. When you reach the top of the wall, you know that you’ve accomplished something incredible.

2. Parkour

If you don’t have the money for a gym membership, find outdoor elements to become your workout area. The art of parkour involves jumping, rolling, swinging, and running as you navigate an urban landscape. You’re always looking for a dynamic way to push your body to new limits.

3. Trapeze

As you go through a yoga routine, your body develops more strength and flexibility. The same dichotomy occurs with this art when using ropes, ribbon, silks, and swings to create beautiful movements in the air. The motion can free your mind, whether you work individually or with a partner.

4. Taekwondo

Numerous martial arts have belief structures that provide a similar foundation when compared to yoga. When you join a dojang, you’ll work on stretching your muscle groups while learning self-defense techniques. You don’t need to earn a black belt to appreciate what this discipline can do for your strength and flexibility.

5. Ballet

Although we often think of ballet as a profession, it is also an accessible exercise format. Adult classes are becoming more available globally, helping you to embrace the concepts and structures without the pressure to perform.

What activities do you plan to try this year to get your body into shape?

Books About Racism and Injustice You Should Read

After George Floyd’s unjust killing and the nationwide protests it sparked, conversations turned toward what racism and injustice mean. The discussion hasn’t been limited to the United States. This issue has become a global issue.

Several books about these topics are worth picking up to read. Even if you don’t engage in public discussion or protests, educating yourself through the perspective of another can be an enriching experience.

When They Call You a Terrorist

This non-fiction book is called a Black Lives Matter memoir. The author talks about growing up in LA, the persecution experienced by African-Americans by law enforcement, and her brother’s jail experiences. When Trayvon Martin’s killer was set free, the stage was set to self-advocate. The pushback was immediate, with 140,000 signatures asking to label BLM as a terrorist organization.

The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead offers a masterpiece that won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. It’s brilliant and devastating simultaneously. It’s the story of a young woman, trapped by slavery, escaping through a series of stations. The painful narrative is something none of us should forget.

If Beale Street Could Talk

This story is the fifth novel by James Baldwin, and it might be his best work. It follows the story of Fonny and Tish, a young couple in love and expecting their child in ‘70s Harlem. Fonny gets falsely accused of rape, gets sent to jail, and we see everything happen from Tish’s viewpoint.

My People Are Rising

This non-fiction work tells the story of Aaron Dixon. He led the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968, staying in that role for about a decade. This work tells of the challenges he faced, leaving no question behind as to how shocking life can be when you’re not in the majority.

So You Want to Talk About Race

Each chapter in this book is a question. The author covers the comments she often gets on social media about race, providing advice on how to have these conversations at home. It’s a practical book, helping others avoid being defensive or going on tangents with these discussions.

We must start having conversations about equality and justice if we’re going to heal our wounds. What happened to George Floyd is wrong. How we fix this problem can ensure his name becomes a lasting legacy.

Why Noom Works When Other Diets Don’t

Weight loss resolutions don’t need to wait for January 1 to get started. Whether you prefer a low-carb diet or intermittent fasting, the reality of dieting remains the same. About 80% of those who lose weight end up gaining it back – and often go beyond their initial scale numbers.

You can lose weight by not eating bread or drinking kale juice, but is it the lifestyle you want?

That’s why diets don’t work. They force you into routines that you hate. Noom is different because it changes how you think.

When you start looking at food differently, your goal is to become healthy. If you’re on a diet, the results are more about what the scale says.

What Makes Noom a Unique Approach to Eating?

If you want to keep weight off after losing it, you need to answer some questions about yourself.

  • What do you eat?
  • Why do you eat?
  • How do you eat?
  • Who are you when you eat?

Noom wants you to change your lifestyle so that you can keep weight off. That process starts with being mindful of your meals. If you think about your activity choices and the foods that work well with them, you’ll provide better fuel that your metabolism can use.

This process helps you uncover the triggers that cause you to eat. Are you using food as a coping mechanism? Working to change your reactions makes it easier to shift your behaviors to other methods that help you feel better.

Noom works with you to identify the challenges and obstacles that keep you where you don’t want to be. You’ll build a toolbox filled with options that let you avoid those roadblocks to enjoy a lifelong health and wellness journey.
If you’re ready to start learning how to make healthier choices, Noom has a course waiting for you! More information about their program is available on their website.

How to Become the Person You Want to Be

What do you see when you look in the mirror?

Do you see a confident person who is chasing their lifelong dreams? Are you gazing into the eyes of an individual who knows what they want?

Does your reflection communicate a lack of confidence? Do you feel like it is a struggle to become the person you want to be?

Self-care is an essential component of who you are. The journey toward a lifelong dream can be long, which means you need the stamina to follow that path. Items from brands like Irwin Naturals, Terry Naturally, and Source Naturals can play a supportive role, but your forward momentum must come from within yourself.

Eliminate the Negative Influences

Most people are willing to compromise. They settle for what they can accomplish within a comfort zone, abandoning the idea of achieving a dream. You must remove those individuals from your life if they try to convince you to do the same. Your philosophy is simple: keep moving forward.

Never Give Up

What happens when you encounter resistance? Do you curl up into the fetal position, or will you formulate a plan to resolve the problems you face? The moment you throw in the towel is the second that your dreams disappear. Push through those trials, and don’t give up!

Be Authentic

You must be true to yourself if you want to grow as a person. You’ll never become what you hope to be while living in a fantasy world. Don’t worry about what others think or say about your dreams. Be the individual that makes you proud each day.

Believe in Yourself

You have the power to achieve whatever you want to accomplish in life. Even during moments of discouragement, you know that you’re working toward something incredible. Believing in your abilities to make your goals become a reality is one of your greatest strengths – and no one can take that belief away from you.

Find an Accountability Network

Hold yourself accountable to your goals each day with someone you trust. It helps to tell them what you expect from yourself so that they can hold you to that standard. A strong-willed personality is helpful, but it may not be the only asset needed to complete your journey. Ask for help if needed.

Knowing how to become the person you want to be requires an honest evaluation of your circumstances is necessary. If you’re not willing to work in truth, the goals may stay out of reach.

25 Mantras to Help You Build Confidence

What is the best way to tap into your self-confidence? Many people use a mantra to remind themselves of who they are and what they can do is a simple way to access that energy and positivity.

Mantras are simple phrases that remind yourself of who you are or hope to be. These words are like seeds that get planted in a garden, ready to blossom and grow when the time is right.

If you want to start building confidence in your life, these mantras can be the seeds that you plant today.

Best Mantras for Self-Confidence

  1. I am enough. I have enough. I do enough each day.
  2. I know the things that I can change and accept what I cannot.
  3. My weaknesses are only one part of who I am. My strengths are the other.
  4. Each success is one step forward to my goal.
  5. Small steps are caused by confidence. I will keep moving.
  6. I believe in myself.
  7. I will listen to my inner voice, and it will listen to me.
  8. Life is a miracle that I will embrace today. I am on my way.
  9. Failure is an opportunity to learn instead of a chance to give up.
  10. I value myself.
  11. My mind, my spirit, and my body are my greatest attributes.
  12. I will not let myself fall into the traps of low self-esteem.
  13. I love myself. I appreciate who I am.
  14. The bumps I encounter in life’s road help me drive in the right direction.
  15. Tears lead to strength. Pain leads to power. Learning leads to resistance.
  16. I can do hard things when they intersect my path.
  17. The worst day is still only 24 hours in duration. I will explore a new tomorrow.
  18. I am worth the effort. I am valuable beyond measure.
  19. There is nothing that I can’t do when I set my mind to a task.
  20. I choose to think positive thoughts today.
  21. No one controls my actions except for me. 
  22. I am powerful.
  23. I will achieve greatness today.
  24. Today will be better than yesterday. Tomorrow will be better than today.
  25. I will love my neighbor as myself. 

Make sure to follow these mantras when you are starting to feel insecure or are unsure of yourself.