What exactly is meditation?

I know you’re not used to hearing from me (and some of you don’t even know who I am!). My name is Gianna and I am Gina’s daughter, owner of Curio Curandera LLC and co-owner of Curio, Craft, & Conjure. While Gina is our resident Divination Queen, I am our resident Healer. I help you to recognize, identify, and work through ancestral and generational trauma so that you can overcome ancestral patterns, thoughts, and beliefs. I use a shamanic approach to energy clearing called “Limpiezas” (which in Spanish means to clear or to clean). I use a combination of sound, plants, and crystals, and guided meditations. This gets me to why I wrote this newsletter…..

What exactly is Meditation?

By definition, meditation is “a practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.”

Simply put, meditation is a personal practice to bring your mind to stillness. Many of us imagine that there is only one way to meditate; sitting in stillness like the image above. That is totally one way to meditate! You can also meditate through yoga, sitting in nature, using mantras. Prayer can be a type of meditation, as well. You can meditate with objects to develop a better connection with them, and you can go on guided meditations. You can use music or singing bowls to enhance your meditations. That being said, your meditative practices will be personal and unique to you.

I know, I know, that all sounds fine and dandy, but why should I meditate in the first place, you ask.

Why Meditate?

Meditation allows you to sit with yourself and really get to know who you are without any of the noise and distractions of everyday life. We are often so caught up with what we’re doing that we don’t think about why we do it.

Why does your mom making fun of that certain song bug you? Why does someone not listening to you trigger you? Meditating and connecting with yourself can answer those questions for you. Meditation has also been known to reduce stress and anxiety. When we are stressed, our bodies produce a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol can affect your memory, cause you to gain weight, and increase anxiety and depression. Imagine that simply adding some sort of meditative practice into your day-to-day can help you reduce stress, therefore reducing the cortisol in your body and helping you to increase your memory!

Outside of the personal benefits, meditation can also help you connect with the energies around you. You can connect to plants, stars, elements, crystals, and more.

In my book “A Year of Connecting,” I offer 12 meditations that allow you to connect to guides, guardians, and elements.

When we meditate with the energies around us, we can develop a deeper connection to these energies and are able to see how they want to work with us.

I once took a class with the amazing Autumn Austin (owner of Journey There wands and the creator of the MOST beautiful wands ever). At the start of the class, she took us on a guided meditation to call in creativity so that we could be more inspired. How genius is that?!

Towards the end of the class, Autumn then had us meditate (or journey) to meet the spirit of what we created so we could know how it wanted us to use it. Often, we buy or create spiritual tools without first checking with the item to see how it wants to help us or work with us. Now I’m getting a little ahead of myself, and you guys are going to have to wait until the next newsletter to see what I’ll be talking about!

Thank you for hanging out with me today!