Daily meditation can help you to leverage the Law of Attraction (LOA) for your training for a marathon, half marathon, or other endurance race. And there are many ways to reach a meditative state. Here are seven of them:
- Acem Meditation: This technique, which dates back to the 1960s, relies on the repetition of a combination of consonants and vowels that is meaningless but is believed to bring the practitioner into a meditative state. Much research on this technique has focused on its biological benefits. But this focus does not negate the potential for this technique to help endurance runners and walkers to use it to put themselves into a more suggestible state for use with other LOA methods.
- Binaural Beats: This approach uses audio technology to take advantage of a “frequency-following response” to auditory stimuli. EEG research studies have found that you can take yourself into a brain-wave frequency that is the most conducive to meditation by listening to auditory stimuli that match that frequency. This technique requires audio programs that have been specially constructed and to which the practitioner listens with stereo headphones instead of through speakers.
- Biofeedback: This technique, which dates back to the 1950s, uses galvanic skin resistance or other measures to give you feedback about your degree of relaxation. The idea is that you can more easily put yourself into a more meditative state by getting constant feedback about your degree of relaxation. This technique requires special hardware that can monitor one or more biological aspects of the practitioner so that it can give the practitioner feedback about those aspects.
- Natural Stress Relief: This approach relies on repetition of a silent mantra to induce a meditative state. This repetition leads the practitioner to deeper levels of thought.
- Prayer Beads: This technique, which is common to many religions, uses a sequence of beads as a physical reminder of things to contemplate in prayer. The idea is that the physical sequence drives a mental sequence that leads the practitioner into a meditative state. The beads vary by color, size, and design according to the practitioner’s particular religion.
- Progressive Muscle Relaxation: Originally developed in the 1920s, this approach is based on the mind-body premise that anxiety, which is definitely not a meditative state, leads to tension in your muscles and therefore that relaxation of your muscles in a progressive way throughout your body leads to a meditative state.
- TM: This technique, which dates back to 1955, uses a mantra on which the practitioner’s attention can rest. It is described as being effortless, in contrast to other meditative techniques, which may require an effort either to keep the mind free of all thoughts or to keep the mind focused on a single thought. Learning this technique requires participation in a seven-step course taught by certified teachers in a standardized way over several days.
Kirk Mahoney, Ph.D., loves to walk and run, and his SpryFeet.com website provides practical research for runners and walkers. By going to http://www.SpryFeet.com/Reports/, you can get his FREE “Pace Tables for Runners and Walkers” special report, letting you look up paces needed to complete several different race distances within given durations and for different micro-level-pacing methods.
(c) Copyright – Kirk Mahoney, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
Pyrros Dimas Training sequence
