This is a very difficult period for the whole world. In many countries, people are forced to stay inside their houses, and in that little time when they are allowed to get out, they are afraid of getting infected. Many have lost their jobs, many are forced to stay away from the people they love. In this difficult time, knowing how to deal with your mind can be life-saving. And this is what meditation is about, it is about learning to control your thoughts and the way you react to the things that happen to you.
Even 10 minutes a day of meditation can make a big difference in your life, so I believe everyone should learn to meditate.

I see meditation as a very important tool that we can use in order to deal with everyday problems and the stress these problems can cause. This tool has been used by humans for thousands of years, especially in the East. Until some years ago you had to go all the way to the Himalayas in order to be able to master this skill, and you needed to move through the different schools to learn the different techniques. But now, thanks to the internet you can just sit at home and learn all the techniques.

How can I learn to meditate?

There are many ways to meditate and if you search online you can find many different techniques from different "masters of meditation". At first, I have also been wandering around and trying different methods but none seemed to work... One day, when randomly listening to one podcast, I came across Sam Harris and his app named "Waking Up".

The app is free for 1 month and after that, it has a cost of 100 euros per year. At the time I didn't have 100 euros to spend on a meditation app, so I decided to just try the app and what surprised me was the way the app deals with meditation. There are many episodes of theory and many guided meditations that take only 10 minutes of your time.
After the first meditation session, I already got some sparkles of what it means to meditate.
That feeling made me want to learn more about it.

A different way of selling things

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One day when I was listening to a podcast by the owner of the app "Sam Harris" I came across a piece of very interesting information. He was saying that if anyone is interested in his app but this would mean for them to not have the money for more important things, he would share it for free cause money should not be a reason to now enjoy the benefits of meditation.

So I decided to try it. The next day I sent an email to him telling him that I really liked the app but at that moment I did not have the money to spend on such things. After a couple of hours I received one email saying that I got 1 free year of the app, No questions asked. I was a bit surprised but in a nice way. That's a really nice business model and I'm pretty sure I will buy the app before my subscription finishes because it's really worth it.

Learning Meditation while watching tv series

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If you like tv series (during this lockdown 90% of people started to like TV series) and wanna learn more about meditation, not long ago Netflix just released a new TV series called "Headspace guide to meditation". I just started this series but it looks very interesting for the ones that are first approaching the world of meditation but also for the veterans because after all, we never stop learning new things.

Each episode is made of 20/30 minutes of theory discussing what is meditation, what it does to your body, what it does to your mind, why you should do it daily, and many more things.
After the theory part, there is a part dedicated to the practice.
The practice consists of 10/15 minutes of guided meditation. All you gotta do is follow the voice of the narrator and trying to do exactly what he says. Do not worry if on the first try you are not able to control your mind and your thoughts, meditation is a skill and as with every other skill, the more you practice, the better you get at it. But every little bit counts and you can start to feel the change in the way you react to things that happen to you even after the first sessions.