A longtime reader wrote that he is going through difficult times with a lot of stress and asked for tips on meditation. He remembered that I started meditating to lower my blood pressure. It proved to be so helpful that I have had a daily meditation practice for over 20 years.
My recommendation is that you make your life a meditation. Let me explain why I reached such a seemingly radical attitude.
I read an article by Zen teacher Shinzen Young recommending a slow-motion dishwashing practice. The idea is to intentionally wash your dishes at about half the speed you would normally wash them. It works. It forces the brain to slow down and relax. It put me right into alpha (pleasant) brain waves and was great fun.
The bottom-line purpose of meditation is to teach us how to control our minds, meaning our awareness or consciousness. My purpose was to lower my blood pressure at the start, and it achieves that goal by what some call a “relaxation response” but what I simply call alpha brain-wave creation.
If your head was hooked up to an EEG (electro-encephalograph), alpha brain waves would gently roll onto the EEG paper like the rolling hills of Virginia, in contrast to the sharp-spike beta waves of waking, chore-oriented consciousness.