FEELING STRESSED ON your commute into work?
Have you given meditation a try?
It’s nothing new – certainly not to Buddhists who’ve been practicing it for over a thousand years – and it’s been gaining traction in the Western world for some time too.
Meditation has many benefits, from relieving the physical symptoms of stress or anxiety to mentally relaxing you and helping you think more clearly. And the more you do it, the better the results.
To help you bring a little meditation into your life, we’ve rounded up six exercises you can do on your commute.*
*Obviously – don’t do these if you drive to work, wait until you’re home. These are specifically for people getting the bus, train, Dart, Luas or other method of transport where they’re not in control of a moving vehicle to get to where they’re going.
Believe it or not, focusing purely on your breath – from one to three breaths – is actually meditating. It might seem too easy to be true, but meditation basically means focusing on the here and now, and that’s what you do when you focus purely on your breath.
You can do this many times throughout the day – but to start off, try and focus for three breaths.
You can meditate for as long as you like of course but let’s start with five minutes.
This is an extension of the breathing exercise above – you focus on your breath for five minutes.
It’s more difficult than it sounds, as you’ll find thoughts intruding very quickly, but the key is not to attach your attention to any of these thoughts, just to let them float away like clouds.
Mindfulness is another word that you’re probably hearing a lot about these days and all it means is paying more attention to what you are doing in the moment without judgement.
Mindfulness meditation is concerned with focusing on different parts of the body – observing without judgement. This type of meditation will hopefully help you to bring this type of non-judgmental observation to what’s going on in your life on a day to day basis.
Guided meditations are very helpful especially if you find it hard just to focus on your own breath for very long as they give you something to focus on.
This calming meditation will be very helpful to do on the way to work, to get you into the right mindset for the day, or on the way home after work if you’re feeling stressed.
Creativity is something that all of us use in our daily lives whether we feel ‘creative’ or not.
Having a calm mind that helps you to look at situations differently will help you to think of creative solutions to problems that you might not have thought about before you added some meditation to your life.
This guided meditation will lead you to imagine creative scenarios and will help you to bring creativity to your life on a day-to-day basis.
We all need love and compassion, but the person we are the least compassionate to is ourselves. This meditation will help you to be kinder to yourself and others, bringing your attention to someone you love unconditionally, someone you’re having trouble with and a person you don’t know but might see regularly, such as a fellow commuter.
As The Beatles said: Love is all you need.
Feeling calmer yet? Great. Here’s another way to bring some calm into your life – head over to Transport for Ireland and plan your journey in advance. No matter where you’re going around Ireland, you can plan your route at Transport for Ireland - your journey starts here.
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