Meditate on the go: These 6 tips can help you

Meditating on the go can help you stay calm in unavoidable stressful situations. With these six tips you will succeed.

In everyday life there are often hectic and overwhelming situations. In particular, busy environments such as crowded trains, noisy airports and long queues can be stressful, as you are bombarded with many impressions and you cannot easily escape the situation – at least not physically.

But you have the opportunity to meditate on the go and still find relaxation and deceleration in everyday life.

Meditate on the go: These 6 tips will help

In order to meditate effectively, you don’t necessarily need a quiet room with meditation cushions. In fact, meditation on the go can be a good practice in mindfulness, despite or because of possible inconveniences such as limited space or loud noises. These tips will help you:

1. Find a relatively quiet place: This can mean looking for a place to stand when the train is full, where other passengers are not constantly squeezing past. If you can, choose a seat that you don’t have to get up from when other people want to get off.
2. Take your time: Plan your meditation so you don’t get rushed about getting off the bus or boarding at the airport. After the meditation, you should have enough free minutes to collect yourself and orientate yourself in the here and now.
3. Switch off avoidable sources of interference: Put your smartphone on flight mode so that calls, emails and messages cannot distract you from your meditation.
4. Close your eyes and breathe: With your eyes closed, you can concentrate better on conscious breathing. It’s the key to meditating on the go, because breathing properly can go a long way in reducing stress. According to Thomas Loew, a professor of psychotherapy, to breathe more slowly, you should take six breaths per minute. Inhale for four seconds and exhale for seven seconds. Take at least two to three minutes to breathe this way. It is best to breathe into your stomach. Abdominal breathing allows for deeper and more relaxed breaths than chest breathing, which usually occurs in stressful situations.
5. Work with the environment, not against it: Don’t shut yourself off from your environment if you want to meditate on the go, but use it specifically to practice mindfulness. Become aware of what’s going on around you: focus on a noise around you, the feel of your bag on your lap, the rumble of the train car, or the temperature of your body. This is how you can become more aware of the present moment, even when everything is in frantic turmoil and movement. You learn to accept external stress factors better if you don’t suppress them with all your might or get angry, but rather face them calmly.
6. Use tools if necessary: ​​If the environment is still too overwhelming for you, you can try using a meditation app. Using headphones to guide you through a guided meditation on the go can help you get into a meditative state faster. You can also use meditation music that you may be using at home anyway. Another tool you can use to attune yourself to meditation are essential oils. Lavender oil, for example, is said to have a particularly calming effect. Packed in small scented rollers, you can take the oil with you and apply it to the insides of your wrists on the go.

Meditation on the go also needs practice

As with meditation at home, if you want to meditate on the go, a little practice is necessary. Make a habit of meditating on the go. For example, make sure you breathe consciously when you’re standing in a long line at the checkout. If you then get into an overwhelming situation, you can reliably call up your practiced breathing technique and thus get into a meditative state more quickly.

Read more on Techzle.com:

• Distress and Eustress: These types of stress exist
• Learning to meditate: tips for beginners
• Relaxation techniques: These 4 exercises slow you down