Let’s talk about why meditation is powerful for college students and how to learn to do it.
To be sure, there’s no special college-student meditation technique. We advocate you learn the standard techniques, and encourage you to do so while you’re a college student.
Why Learn to Meditate as a Student?
It’s a Powerful Life Skill
First of all, since college is all about picking up skills that will hopefully serve you in the future, it’s worth noting that meditation itself is a powerful life skill. It has so many benefits, and once you’ve practiced a while, the benefits start to become permanent.
It’ll serve you for the rest of your life: you can bring the lessons and skills into all aspects of career, family and friendship. Learn it early, and you’re way ahead of the curve. You’ll build your entire adult life on a foundation of greater awareness, centeredness and wellbeing, the benefits of which are too numerable to mention here.
And others notice: they sense that you meditate, because you possess an aura, energy, a calmness and centeredness that most people don’t.
It Helps You Handle Stress
The evidence is pretty clear: meditation helps you handle stressors and be more resilient during tough times. This has been proven neuroscientifically, biologically and dermatologically.
Though working adults often look down on college students as idle party-goers, the fact is that in college you face a number of stressors. Friendship demands. Living away from home for the first time. College work. Exams. Prospective internships and job positions. It’s full of stress-inducing events, and learning to meditate can help you navigate the difficult moments with more skill, composure and compassion.
You Have The Time and Space
During college, most students have more time freedom than they do as working adults. One of the challenges of meditation is finding the time. It’s crucial to practice it on a regular basis in your own time if you want to see the transformation.
Unfortunately, most adults find it tricky to motivate themselves to practice every day on top of meeting their other responsibilities. As such, college is a great time to learn. Once you’ve practiced for a few years, you’ll find it a lot easier to find the time for meditation and integrate it into your daily life.
Not only will you have time to nurture and build a daily meditation habit, you can invest your spare time into deepening your knowledge of it, which feeds back into your practice. During your summer vacations, you can even take retreats or do meditation intensives to take your practice to the next level.
How to Learn
Now you have a few specific reasons to learn to meditate as a college student, let’s talk about how to learn. We reckon most college students will turn to that omnipresent handheld device – the smartphone – to learn using apps or YouTube.
The issue with this approach is that it doesn’t tend to stick for long and it leads to scattered learning. Besides, a lot of the meditation on these platforms is quite shallow. We suggest you seek a teacher in-person, either in a group setting or one-to-one, so that you get a structure and a sense of accountability. Another option is to hire an online mindfulness coach who can tailor your meditation practice to your unique goals and challenges.
You can also go for the DIY approach if you don’t have much cash to spend: there are dozens of online courses, audio programs and books out there. In any case, search around to find a method and teacher that resonate with you.
Awesome, we hope this article inspires you to build a powerful meditation practice during your time as a college student.