To eliminate pain, there are certain techniques that you could try from meditation and yoga and we give you a bit about them here. These exercises are very simple to pick up and they don’t really take up too much time. Today, all over the world and amongst all cultures, this ancient healing and stress relieving discipline is becoming popular among all ages. Meditation is an introspective technique, using contemplation to help focus the mind on a precise thought or object.

You can meditate with the accompaniment of chanting or maybe music – you could even do it with absolute silence. You can also focus on a picture or concentrate on your own breathing cycle and posture. No matter what the approach used, a quiet environment and a fixed uninterrupted time span will be required. Once you have decided what it is you want to focus on and where you are going to practice it, make yourself comfortable- not too much so you fall asleep. Done right, this gets you into a detached state even though you are aware of what is going on around you – this is a relaxed rather trance-like state. Generally people experience the limited Alpha State. In many religions, meditation is part of the spiritual practice. Buddhism uses it in order to focus and direct one’s mental path to get to the point of enlightenment. You can meditate anywhere and in any posture – while lying back, walking, sitting, whatever – however, the best position would be ‘zazen’ or sitting down.

Harvard Medical School Professor Herbert Benson’s research, documents the psychological and physical advantages of meditation. Just twenty minutes is enough to make a visible difference in controlling your blood pressure, your heart and breathing rate and you metabolism. The deeper states will very often bring about mental images like bursts of color and images and maybe even a still, small voice. It has been proved by follow-on studies that meditation also relieves stress, headaches, anxiety, fatigue, migraine, chronic pain and insomnia.

With better awareness comes a better state of health and you will find that your functioning – whether physical, mental, emotional or psychological – is so much more enhanced and healthy. Though traditional use of meditation was to be seen in spiritual well being, recent popularity is due to its ability to relieve stress and achieve relaxed tranquil state of mind in the midst of the rat-race. You can lead a stress free life if you combine yoga sessions with meditation.