meditation Archives

May 3, 2018 By Luke Coutinho Leave a Comment

Ways to become “mindful”

Learning to focus the mind can be a powerful antidote to the stress and strains of our fast-paced on-the-go lives. The ability to pay attention to what you’re experiencing from moment to moment — without drifting into thoughts of the past or concerns about the future, or getting caught up in opinions about what is going on — is called ‘Mindfulness’.

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This basic mindfulness meditation exercise is easy to learn and practice.

Firstly, sit on a straight-backed chair, or cross-legged on the floor.
Focus on an aspect of your breathing, such as the sensations of air flowing into your nostrils and out of your mouth, or your belly rising and falling as you inhale and exhale.
Once you’ve narrowed your concentration in this way, begin to widen your focus. Become aware of sounds, sensations, and ideas.
Embrace and consider each thought or sensation without judging it as good or bad. If your mind starts to race, return your focus to your breathing. Then expand your awareness again.

The effects of mindfulness meditation tend to be dose-related — the more you practice it, the more benefits you usually experience.

A less formal approach can also help you stay in the present and fully engage in your life. You can practice mindfulness at any time or during any task, whether you are eating, showering, walking, touching a partner, or playing with a child. Here’s how:

Start by bringing your attention to the sensations in your body.
Breathe in through your nose, allowing the air to move downward into your lower belly. Let your abdomen expand fully. Then breathe out through your mouth. Notice the sensations of each inhalation and exhalation.
Proceed with the task at hand slowly and with full deliberation.
Engage your senses fully. Notice each sight, touch, and sound so that you savour every sensation.
When you notice that your mind has wandered from the task at hand, gently bring your attention back to the sensations of the moment.

January 31, 2018 By Anusha Subramanian Leave a Comment

Games4Good for Mental Fitness

‘Memory Games’, seems to be the most sought after by GOQii players on ‘Games4Good’, the games platform that helps GOQii users, to connect, play, score and motivate each other.

Playing games on the mobile and other handheld devices has never got better. It has become part of daily routine for people of all ages. While, the ‘Brain Games’ or Memory games as we call it is designed to optimize cognitive functions and improve mental fitness, it is also designed to help individuals have fun both scoring and winning over each other.

These games while being fun also help individuals to break the monotony, concentrate and keeps the individual motivated.

What are Brain Games?

Brain, one of the most important body part helps us to do many functionalities in our daily routine and helps to maintain our health. Living a healthy lifestyle is enough for us to improve our brain health. There are various ways to keep our brain healthy, some of these are staying hydrated, eating mindfully to keep body and brain fit, sleeping well, meditating to increase our brain power, self-confidence, controls emotions, reduces stress and relaxes the mind, following a hobby helps to keep the brain active and lastly play games to avoid boredom and improve the cognitive skills.

With age most humans tend to struggle with learning, thinking and being attentive. These are caused largely due to weak cognitive skills. Playing games allows you to improve your cognitive skills through intense but fun mental exercises, it helps to pay attention, concentrate, learn, reads, remember and think.

The rule of practice works with a human brain too. The more you practice the game, the better you get at it. When you do certain activity multiple times your brain gets bored as well and does not feel the challenge anymore. The reason for this is because you start mastering the skills. When this happens, you need to start increasing the difficulty levels of the game and keeps yourself challenged. In games scoring is a component of fun, feel motivated and tracking your own progress.

Cognitive or Brain games helps you to stay focused and remember the information while doing multiple things. It tends to improve short-term memory, recall information stored in the past, improves logic & reasoning. These games increase your problem-solving ability, decision making and strategy development. It also enhances and improves hand-eye coordination. To hang on to information while in the process of using it, to think in visual images, perform tasks quickly and accurately.

So, if you haven’t tried the games on GOQii Games4Good-now is the time to challenge your brain with games to train Memory, Focus, Problem Solving, Mental agility and all other cognitive skills.

December 17, 2017 By Parwage Alam 8 Comments

Myths and Health Benefits of Meditation

Stress can be dangerous. Here is a link to a blog on Stress

http://goqii.com/blog/avoid-stress-lead-a-healthy-and-happy-life/

In this blog, I am going to talk about meditation and its health benefits in detail. Most foreigners are it the Americans or the Europeans aren’t raised to sit and say “Om.” But, today whether it is outside of India or within our country at every nook and corner you can find a yoga and meditation centre. Meditation has gained millions of converts, helping them ease chronic pain, anxiety, stress, improve heart health, boost mood and immunity, and resolve a lot of medical issues even pregnancy problems.

According to doctors, any condition that’s caused or worsened by stress can be alleviated through meditation. Peace is something we all seek for or let’s say satisfaction is something we all long for. Satisfaction could be different for different people. For some satisfaction could mean happiness, for some it could be an achievement. The influence of external factors in our life largely decides our state of mind to be happy, sad or angry.

We often seek for happiness or peace in the outside world. People have their own ways of finding peace or relaxing their mind. Most common practice is going out of town or getting away from our usual routine. It’s very necessary to find peace within us as not everyone can afford to go out of station often. So here is what we can do and also save some money in the process to reach our goal of happiness and peace- MEDITATE.

Meditation you can transform the mind. Meditation doesn’t mean that you have to sit in a particular posture and focus on any single point on the wall or certain point. The definition of meditation is different for different people. If you ask me, meditation is the art of focusing our attention (100%) in one area. We all believe that our mind gets maximum rest while sleeping; however, the fact is that our mind gets to rest and relief while meditating.

Doctors who recommend meditation say that the relaxation response [from meditation] helps decrease metabolism, lowers blood pressure and improves heart rate, breathing, and brain waves. Tension and tightness seep from muscles as the body receives a quiet message to relax.

Articles in medical journals on Meditation indicate there is scientific evidence that shows how meditation works. In people who are meditating, brain scans called MRI have shown an increase in activity in areas that control metabolism and heart rate. Other studies on Buddhist monks have shown that meditation produces long-lasting changes in the brain activity in areas involved in attention, working memory, learning, and conscious perception.

There are some dangerous myths about meditation like:

1. Meditation is a religion: Meditation is not related to any religion. However, meditation brings all religion together.

2. Just relaxation: Meditation is not about just relaxation like sitting on your sofa or lying on your resting chair, meditation helps to produce specific chemical changes in the brain. For example, Transcendental meditation is known to cause the brain to release a soothing hormone known as prolactin.

3. Sit in the lotus posture to meditate: There is a myth that meditating you should always sit in a lotus posture. However, while meditating it is more important to be comfortable and steady. You can sit cross-legged, on a chair, in a sofa – it is fine, but it is mandatory that you have to maintain the same position till you finish meditating.

4. Meditation is for old people: Most of the people believe that meditation is only for people who have reached a certain age or for old people. That is so untrue. Meditation is universal and anyone can do it. It adds value to lives of people of all age groups. A study in the American Journal of Hypertension showed that teenagers who meditated for 15 minutes twice a day for four months were able to lower their blood pressure a few points.10 minutes of meditation in the morning clean your mind, it gives zeal and enthusiasm.

5. Meditation is like hypnotizing yourself: Most of the people believe that Meditation is hypnotising you. But, that’s again false. In hypnotism no one is aware what he or she is going through, however, in meditation, you are always aware of each and every moment.

If you are feeling tense, tired, depressed or anxious or stressed, the one simple word I can suggest or recommend is ‘Meditation’. Five to 10 minutes of meditation will help you relax and get over your stress and restore your calm and inner peace.

Anyone can start meditating with a small practice. It’s really very simple and does not require you to visit therapists or a practitioner of meditation. It also does not require any equipment. You can practice meditation whenever and wherever you are – in office, home, on the bus or train, or waiting at the doctor’s clinic or even in the middle of a difficult business meeting.

Meditation works as a medicine of mind and body and produces a deep state of relaxation. During meditation, we centralize our attention and get rid of the unwanted stress-causing thoughts. This process results in enhanced physical and emotional well-being.

Some great Benefits of Meditation:

Psychological Benefits: Reduces stress and anxiety, increases creativity and intelligence. Reduces depression, increases learning ability, reasoning and memory power, reduces irritability and moodiness, Feelings of vitality and rejuvenation, increase emotional control, self-esteem, alertness, Improves relationships and also concentration

Physiological Benefits: May help lower blood pressure, Prevents or relives any pain, boosts immune system- with meditation higher levels of antibodies are produced against the flu virus, according to the study in Psychosomatic Medicine, lowers blood cholesterol levels, improves airflow through the respiratory system, especially in those with asthma, Youngers your biological age.

Women can also benefit from meditation. Quoting a study from an article in WebMD, the article says that PMS symptoms subsided by 58% when women meditated. certain other issues such as anxiety, depression, and fatigue can also be reduced by a regular meditation program.

June 14, 2016 By Luke Coutinho Leave a Comment

Ways to become “mindful”

Learning to focus the mind can be a powerful antidote to the stresses and strains of our on-the-go lives. The ability to pay attention to what you’re experiencing each moment — without drifting into thoughts of the past or concerns about the future, or getting caught up in opinions about what is going on — is called mindfulness.

This basic mindfulness meditation exercise is easy to learn and practice.

Sit on a straight-backed chair, or cross-legged on the floor.
Focus on an aspect of your breathing, such as the sensations of air flowing into your nostrils and out of your mouth, or your belly rising and falling as you inhale and exhale.
Once you’ve narrowed your concentration in this way, begin to widen your focus. Become aware of sounds, sensations, and ideas.
Embrace and consider each thought or sensation without judging it as good or bad. If your mind starts to race, return your focus to your breathing. Then expand your awareness again.

The effects of mindfulness meditation tend to be dose-related — the more you practice it, the more benefits you usually experience.

Start by bringing your attention to the sensations in your body.
Breathe in through your nose, allowing the air to move downward into your lower belly. Let your abdomen expand fully. Then breathe out through your mouth. Notice the sensations of each inhalation and exhalation.
Proceed with the task at hand slowly and with full deliberation.
Engage your senses fully. Notice each sight, touch, and sound so that you savor every sensation.
When you notice that your mind has wandered from the task at hand, gently bring your attention back to the sensations of the moment.

So be mindful and unleash your potential.