So you want to make a change and you’re wondering how to find inner peace?
We have five easy DIY steps for enriching your body, refreshing your mind and nourishing your spirit.
1. Loving-Kindness Meditation
Metta bhavana, or the cultivation of loving-kindness, is one of the ways that you can use to practice giving unlimited love to others, and most importantly to yourself. This love is pure and doesn’t have any conditions or expectations of anything in return. Consider the calmness and peace of self-acceptance as you meditate. Think of yourself first, then your close family and friends, even your enemies, and ultimately all living things. But with the same love. Open your heart in the final stage in order to spread a peaceful and generous love to all of them equally.
Benefits: When you focus on loving-kindness, it allows for acceptance and personal forgiveness, along with letting go off irritation and judgment of others.
Practice: Follow these simple traditional phrases that can be found here or feel free to choose ones yourself.
2. Restorative Yoga
Similar souls like you, wondering how to find inner peace, find this practice very pleasant.
Restorative yoga is a method that is all about calming down and freeing up your body by passive stretching. Crocodile (makarasana), thunderbolt (vajrasana), and a simple supported backbend are therapeutic postures that are extremely nourishing when held for several minutes. Opening your third eye can have astounding benefits when accompanied by yoga. These restorative poses can help reduce chronic stress symptoms by increasing blood flow, gentle breathing, and physical relief. Using props such as pillows, straps, and blankets are good for improving your comfort and enhancing your contentment.
Benefits: Restorative yoga can help ease acute stress and decrease depression, insomnia, menstrual distress, headaches and jet lag.
Practice: Consider getting Judith Hanson Lasater’s Relax and Renew: Restful Yoga for Stressful Times for a detailed guide to therapeutic sequences of supported postures and relaxation techniques.
3. Altruism
Try practicing simple acts of kindness out of a desire to help and not expect anything in return. As a result, this will make you happy, inspire your creative side and even gain you respect in your community. Best of all, there is no need for money. Many of the most altruistic gestures require just time and an unselfish heart – for example, saying kind words or helping a complete stranger by holding the door. If you engage in spontaneous acts of kindness, it can start a chain of reactions in which others repay you for the empathy you’ve shown and shared with them.
Benefits: Research indicates that altruism helps in improving mental and physical health, lifting our love lives, and providing benefits for our health and finances.
Practice: Write a letter of commendation to the friendly public servant’s supervisor. Help to those in need, without even being asked. Above all – everything you do, do it with sincere kindness.
4. Ecstatic Dance
Most people wondering how to find inner peace find are surprised by the effect of dancing in front of the mirror at home… Sounds familiar? Would you feel free to do it in a peaceful and safe environment with a large group? The conscious dancing which is done in the way you choose took root on Hawaii’s Big Island circa 2000 and has since grown strong in major cities on the mainland. This dance meditation is improvisational and unique – the same as its practitioners. Feel free to go round in circles or move slowly – wherever your joy takes you.
Benefits: A zone free of judgments allows you to release negative energy, express your deepest rhythms freely, and unlock your deepest creative side. Moreover, if you dance for several hours, you will get quite a workout, too.
Practice: A listing of local ecstatic dance groups can be found at EcstaticDance.org
5. Sound Therapy
Traditional therapy with sound involves non-denominational overtone singing, shamanic drumming, and even Buddhist singing bowls. However, the modern practice is as simple as listening to recorded music encoded in binaural beats — two subtly different tones in each ear create brain-wave training. As a result, you’re not going to hear the imperceptible frequencies in the songs — just your relaxed state.
Benefits: A study review from 2008 in the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine showed that listening to binaural beats can relieve tension, improve PMS symptoms, and alleviate physical pain such as headaches.
Practice: Choose a CD with binaural beat music to suit your unique symptoms related to stress at Hemi-Sync.com. Steven Halpern is a Grammy-nominated composer and sound therapist and his soothing, minimalist music can be found at InnerPeaceMusic.com.