Oftentimes, people struggle to cope with the busy, fast-paced world we are living in. Thousands of cars horn at each other on the streets, the heavy workload from work or school never seems to end, and most importantly people are on their screens for an excessive amount of time every day. Evidently, we are living in a world where it is so easy to get stressed. Decompressing these daily life stress is crucial in order to stay healthy. Personally, the solution I’ve found helpful is practicing meditation.
It is a quite well-known fact that meditation benefits you in many different ways. I have been using several guided meditation apps to help me organize my thoughts, reduce stress, and improve my sleeping. However, I also observed how hearing plays a critical role in guided meditations offered through popular apps such as Headspace, Calm, and Insight Timer.
This made me start wondering how the deaf community can experience guided meditations now that this has become a daily habit of mine. In fact, oftentimes the meditation session will start with the speaker ordering me to close my eyes and “listen” to his voice. After some brief research, I learned that guided meditations for deaf people isn’t something that has been explored very deeply yet. Videos uploaded on youtube are of poor quality, and the question-and-answer websites’ solutions are not satisfactory.
John Shore, a meditation researcher, said that meditation does not require your ears. He explains further, saying that it might be even easier for you to meditate if you can’t hear. However, this is only if you know how to meditate. Meditation requires a lot of practice and a deep understanding of the field. There are a lot of cases where people who try meditation for the first time give up in the middle because it is too hard to perform it correctly. The beauty of guided meditations, however, acknowledge the difficulty of practicing and help meditation novices to perform it correctly and effectively.
Guided meditation has helped me a lot as mentioned above, and I would recommend it to anybody I meet. The deaf community is also not an exception. Considering how not all deaf people are meditation prodigies, specific guided meditations for the deaf community should be made for everyone in our world to learn meditation easily.
Featured Image via Headspace