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Despite the known benefits of meditation, many people still fail to practice meditation on a regular basis. The most common obstacles to meditation are:

Claiming that you don’t have enough time to meditate normally means that you haven’t made it a high enough priority. If you are serious about making meditation part of your life, you need to make time for it. Here are some ways that you can do that.

Remember that regular meditation, even if only practiced five minutes a day can have a strong, positive impact on both your inner and outer life. It will help make your energy clear and focused. When you function with clarity and focus, your productivity and effectiveness will increase therefore enabling you to get more done in a day.

Indian yogi and guru, Paramahansa Yogananda said “the more we meditate, the more we will want to meditate” Often it’s just a matter of getting started. Once you begin, you will want to do it more and more.

In amidst your daily activities take moments to stop, relax your mind, and be mindful of the present moment. Start with short one minute moments and increase them from there.

If you have to wait for an appointment or you are waiting in a grocery store line, take a moment to notice your breathing. Focus on each breath until you feel that you have achieved a relaxed and peaceful state.

Sitting still sounds pretty simple, but it can be quite tough. Right when you sit down to meditate you suddenly get hungry or thirsty, or you get an incessant itch that won’t go away, or your mind starts running in circles thinking about what you need to get done or who you have to call.

It is possible however to calm your mind and remain still and quiet. Some suggestions for doing that are:

Recognize that learning to sit still takes work. Understand that you have to train your body to remain calm and quiet.

The more you practice meditation, the more you will be able to recognize your mental chatter, accept it, and let it go. Eventually, you will get good at sitting still and being quiet. The peace, quiet, and stillness that you experience during meditation will become something you look forward to.

At first, you will have to force your mind to do what you want it to do. Before it is disciplined, your mind is like a badly behaved, undisciplined child doing whatever it wants to do. It will rebel and resist the new habit you are teaching it.

Eventually your mind will behave and do what you tell it to do. Use practices like chanting, prayer, and breathing exercises to focus your mind and bring it back to where you want it to be.

You can be motivated to meditate yet fall asleep shortly after starting your meditation practice. This is normal at first, however there are ways that you can combat this.

The best time to meditate is 15 minutes to half an hour after rising in the morning when you feel refreshed and wide awake. Mid-day meditation also works well. Try to avoid meditating just before bed.

Paramahansa Yogananda said “Squeeze your eyes shut several times, then open them wide and stare straight ahead. Repeat this practice once or twice more. If you do this, sleepiness will cease to bother you.” Keeping your eyes lifted during meditation helps you stay more alert and tuned into a higher level of consciousness.

To meditate successfully takes practice. No one expects to master the piano the first time they play it. It’s the same with meditation. It takes time.

The Buddha said that “stilling the mind is the most challenging, yet rewarding task that we will ever undertake. The good news is that every effort toward inner calmness helps transform us over time.”

Modern society is full of knick knacks, gadgets, and media that stimulate us on a daily basis. In amongst this playground of stimuli it’s no wonder that meditation can seem boring.

Until you develop an appreciation for the beauty of inner silence you will just have to trust that getting to that place will be well worth the effort .

We tend to make meditation more complicated than it is. Meditation is simply about being present in the moment. If you can sit down and breathe, you know how to meditate.

Simple mindfulness meditation has no goal other than sitting still, allowing yourself to be comfortable with just being, and calming your mind. Our culture has taught us to believe that there has to be a right and a wrong way of doing something. Meditation doesn’t adhere to this false belief. The fact that you sit down and calm your mind in your own personal way is enough.