Hello everybody and welcome to the mindful kind.

I'm your host, Rachel Cable, and I'm here to share insights into my mindfulness journey

and inspire you to create your own.

Each week, this podcast will bring fresh and exciting news about mindfulness,

from my personal experiences to useful tools and different

mindful techniques.

Hello and welcome to episode 149 of the Mindful Kind podcast. I'm so excited for this episode because it's the

first one of my new mini series about meditation. Over the next three episodes, I'll be exploring

different types of meditation, including mindfulness, my own journey with meditation and a few

examples of simple meditations that you can try yourself.

In the episode today, I'm going to share what meditation is, some of the interesting research

behind meditation and the potential benefits of maintaining a regular meditation practice.

So first of all, what is meditation?

Different forms of meditation have been around for thousands of years, but it was only in the late 1800s that meditation became more widely known

in the Western world. Meditation refers to a broad range of practices, ranging from techniques

which promote relaxation to techniques

designed for specific purposes such as pain relief, mental clarity or emotional exploration.

There are many types of meditation which I will be exploring on the next episode of The Mindful

Kind. But what I really love about meditation is how we can experiment with

it and learn new things about ourselves and experience different states and levels of awareness.

I remember when I first started learning about meditation, I struggled for a long time because I

just couldn't sit and concentrate without my mind going absolutely haywire,

...