Walking meditation, where you focus on the movement of your body as you take step after step, your feet touching and leaving the ground—an everyday activity we usually take for granted.

One kind of meditation technique that’s good for beginners is a body scan meditation, which helps us check in with our bodies by mentally scanning each part.

If you find yourself ruminating about something that happened, tell yourself: “remembering.” You can come up with your own labels, but the point is to simply acknowledge what’s coming up, give it a nod, and then let it go without engaging any further.

We know we’ll encounter the challenges we talked about here while we’re learning to meditate. When they pop up, we can return to this article to refresh ourselves on the basics and tips to get back on track.

The raisin exercise, where you slowly use all of your senses, one after another, to observe a raisin in great detail, from the way it feels in your hand to the way its taste bursts on your tongue.

Meditation does seem to improve mental health—but it’s not necessarily more effective than other steps you can take. Early research suggested that mindfulness meditation had a dramatic impact on our mental health. But as the number of studies has grown, so has scientific skepticism about these initial claims. For example, a 2014 meta-analysis published in JAMA Internal Medicine

A new study examines how different aspects of mindfulness influence our emotional well-being. By Hooria Jazaieri

Tune into your body’s physical sensations, from the water hitting your skin in the shower to the way your body rests in your office chair.

Not bad for a few minutes of sitting in silence, right? And it just gets better from here. Read on to learn more about meditation and how to start meditating yourself.

The more we practice, the more we can see thoughts for what they are: just thoughts. It’ll get easier to let them go and “get out of our heads” to be more engaged in what we’re doing, whether we’re spending time with family, making time for self-care, or working against a deadline.

A science-backed practice of nurturing positive feelings and resilience, we bring our awareness to all the good, nourishing and fulfilling elements of our life, big and small.

The Headspace app has hundreds of guided exercises to help you build your practice. Start by searching these three meditations to help you start a meditation practice. A happier, healthier you is a eliminate negative energy few breaths away.

It does this through various points of support based on experience level, how much time you may have, and with practices designed to meet you exactly where you are that day, in your particular life stage, and wherever you are along your meditation journey.

But that doesn’t mean we’ll feel clear, calm, and kind as soon as we start or finish. Since the mind is always changing, our experience might feel different each time we meditate.