Meditation Techniques for Gwyneth Paltrow

Keanu Reeves does it, Orlando Bloom does it, Tina Turner does it, even Steven Segal does it – and apparently he does it a lot. Kate Bosworth does it and last year, Beyonce Knowles talked openly about doing it too. Some of these guys are probably even doing it right now. Then this week we discovered that at the top of her 2010 to-do list, Gwyneth Paltrow has committed herself to doing it as well.

Like a lot of people, these celebrities have spent much time thinking about it before they actually took the plunge and started to do it in practise. That’s because meditation is one of those things that is a lot easier said than done.

Last year Beyonce talked about her virtual addiction to analyzing things. “I analyze. It’s really easy to fall into your own world, really, really easy. Every day, it’s something that you have to be aware of.” It’s probably the same for most of us. The world of thought has a way of blossoming a life of its own and, though much good can come of it – ask any of the artists above – it can also become self defeating too. This is exactly what Gwyneth Paltrow seems to have discovered with her latest commitment to self improvement, “My brain drives me mental. I am going to start. Tomorrow." She wrote in her blog. She has been reportedly going through some marital difficulty lately and it is often during times of adversity that people start to experiment with meditation techniques as a route inner renewal and self discovery.

"My friends who do it say it’s really freakin' brilliant. It’s always sounded like something I should do, but I don’t know how to." Paltrow says.

Meditation is like finding a new channel - a new frequency to exist on - if even for a few minutes a day. The greatest mistake people make is in trying to push themselves to stop thinking and analyzing in order to meditate, but the truth is that we are no more able to do that than we are able to stop breathing. Even the Dalai Lama’s unlikely to avoid a thought or two when he’s been meditating for a few minutes. One of the more effective meditation techniques is to look at your thoughts like waves on a shore. As they lap in and out, so will our thoughts. Sometimes we’ll be thinking, but as soon as we become conscious of it, we can return to awareness – a global non-thinking awareness – again, and then it will go, and then again it will return, because that’s how it’s meant to be.

We may spend much of our time, watching the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Keanu Reeves and Beyonce Knowles and that’s fine, but now and then we can truly benefit from just watching the most important person of all – ourselves.