Sleep Deep Tonight with These 4 Guided Meditations on Spotify

I think it’s kinda ironic how technology has come to play such an influential role in our lives in our day to day activities.  I find it ironic because the same technology that is meant to make our lives more convenient can also make things more complicated.  That, is irony. (welp, from what I learned from Alanis Morissette at least)

Take for instance the way we communicate:

We can now communicate with virtually any person, any where in the world, any time we want to.  That’s pretty convenient.

However, we’ve complicated it by making numerous social media sites and varoius platforms that it can get confusing.  Do you e-mail someone?  Skype them? FB message them?  Tweet them? Hence, making it more complicated.

So, what have we done to try to make the complicated less complicated?  We’ve made more applications to put all the other applications in one spot, meaning, we’ve had to make another application.  See where I’m coming from?

Take sleep as another example…working with clients I find that most of us are up late at night still on the computer, iPad or iPhone…and now that I have one, I’m finding that I’m one of them too.  Yikes.

Anywho, I think it’s kinda ironic that the same technology that can keep us awake at night, can also help us sleep.

I don’t consider myself too much of a techie, (I literally just got an iPhone this weekend), but there are a few applications that I love using, and one of them is Spotify, an online library of music that you can access with the internet.

Its a great way to find new music and share your playlists with friends, but I’ve gotten the most use from it by listening to guided meditations to help me sleep.

Basically, a guided meditation is a way of meditating to help you reach a certain state of consciousness, in this case we’re talking about sleep.  A guided meditation can be led by an individual in a group, and is used in meditation groups, and energy healing practices like reiki.  But you don’t have to go to a meditation group to get the benefits, you can also listen to guided meditations through audio tracks.

And Spotify, which is free, is a great way to discover guided meditations that will work for you.  Since a huge component of health, and losing weight requires you to get your ass in bed, getting a little help can go a long way.  So important that REST (sleep) is one of the four components of the Lean Body Challenge, the other three being, food, movement, and love baby, love.  You can’t expect to lose weight and get healthy while staying up till 2 am.  Your body just can’t do it.

To help you get better sleep, try out these 4 guided meditations you can find on Spotify:

Deborah Koan: Heart Play

This guided meditation is specifically geared towards your heart, your 4th chakra.  It’s a very peaceful and relaxing meditation that always put me to sleep and helps me feel more at ease about myself when I’m feeling cray cray.

Brad Austen: A Guided Journey to Deep Sleep

Nice background music and the dude speaking is from Australia, so he has a nice soothing accent.  I find that it does help that the person leading the mediation have an accent, I dunno why, but it just sounds better.

You can check out Brad’s meditations on his site here: http://www.mindful-meditations.com/index.html

Essential Sleep: Guided Meditation by Simonette Vaja

This is a shorter meditation about 18 minutes long, but it does a great job of helping you visualize a beautiful bed that really does help you get to sleep.  Again, this one is not only led by a woman but she also has either an Australian or New Zealand accent, which again, for some reason helps me relax better.

You can check out Simonette’s meditations on her site here: http://lovinglifestrategies.com/meditation/

Deep Sleep Neurotherapy Guided Meditation by Kristine Kreska

This is another good one, but it not only has a guided meditation but it also uses what is called brain wave entrainment which actually helps bring your brain waves to an amplitude that is conducive to suggestability, or a state where you’re more likely to comply, kinda like hypnosis.  You’ll have to use headphones for this one because the frequencies used in the track are different in each ear.

As a word of caution, it’s recommend that you do not drive any vehicles or operate farm equipment or heavy machinery while listening to these tracks.  Sooooo, best not to put this on your “Workout Mix ’12” or “Songs for a Long Ass Road Trip” playlists.  Just sayin’.

To check out my Guided Meditations for Sleep playlist, click here.