If you are a busy person who wants to learn how to relax and achieve inner peace , what do you do? The best thing to gain the kind of relaxation you crave is to turn towards the techniques taught with guided meditation. Guided meditation provides you with step-by-step instructions that are accompanied with visualization that paints a picture on the interior of your mind’s eye. Affirmation is an additional technique that is taught alongside visualization. Once you have followed your guided meditation and your brain has reached the meditative state in which it operates in the alpha state of consciousness, you reinforce the pictures in your mind with assertions. These positive assertions emphasize belief structures that you are attempting to insert into your psyche in place of negative assertions that underpinned your previous belief and behavior .

When you reach a certain degree of experience it is more than possible for you to easily alter your state of consciousness from the beta brain pattern to the alpha brain pattern, sliding with ease into the meditative state. However, when you are just starting out and are new to meditation you are dependent on the techniques taught as guided meditation . These techniques can be divided into three sections. These sections can be broken down into the first phase which is 10 minutes of the most basic meditation that is relatively easy to fulfill. The next level of guided meditation is at an intermediate level. This level takes 20 minutes to fulfill. Finally, as you become more experienced, you progress to the more advanced level of guided meditation which takes a full 30 minutes to get through all the instructions at this level.

When meditating, guided or otherwise, you shouldn’t take longer than 30 minutes a day, firstly because it would be too difficult to find time to fit any longer than that into a busy day and would result in you putting it off and finding reasons not to meditate at all. The second reason for being advised against meditating for more than 30 minutes a day is because it could detrimentally affect your relationships, effectively detracting from the benefits you are supposed to be gaining from meditation.

There is a sense that meditation might have ‘come of age’, moving away from minority groups who treated it as a lifestyle activity and becoming more acceptable to the wider population. Since the advent of guided meditation and the techniques of visualization and affirmation, meditation is less of a mystery and considered to be more of an exercise that involves the health of the whole body. Scientific understanding has certainly helped improve its image, with more people understanding the different brain patterns and states of consciousness. Being able to explain to people why meditation can help to produce relaxation and to help in physical healing and how guided meditation is able to help the relative novice to achieve results, goes a long way in helping to make meditation an acceptable exercise .

Author's Bio: 

The Silva Life Method has assisted more than 6 million people, including graduates from professional and scientific fields to achieve positive changes in their emotional wellbeing, relationships, careers, health and finances. This method has made a difference to people in 110 countries. To find out more about what the Silva Life Method can do for you, visit: http://www.silvalifesystem.com/articles/meditation-techniques/guided-med...