People learn to meditate for various reasons, and meditation can have huge benefits for your physical, mental and emotional health. While there are many books and articles available on how to meditate, it's also important to be aware of some of the pitfalls that meditation can involve, and what not to do. In this article we'll take a look at three things that often derail new meditators, and what you should do to avoid them.

This is not to try to put anyone off meditating – just the opposite in fact. To have the best chance of sticking with it, and getting the most from your sessions, you need to know what to expect when learning to meditate, and what are realistic expectations about what you can expect to experience.

So, here are three things to try to avoid when learning to meditate.

1. Impatience

First and foremost, don't expect results too soon. Like anything else, meditation is a skill that needs to be learned and practised. While some people seem to be naturally gifted at keeping their thoughts focused, for most of us it’s more difficult, and it takes time to learn to quiet the mind and experience the full benefits of meditation.

So, what should you expect instead? You should be prepared to meditate every day without any real expectations to begin with. This might sound a bit odd to those who are typically goal-orientated, but meditation is really one of those things that should be done for its own sake, at least at the start. Later on, you might want to meditate for specific purposes, such as reducing anxiety or developing extra-sensory perception, but for now, just focus on sitting in meditation without an end goal in mind. This way, you’ll feel less frustrated on those inevitable days where you sit there with thoughts racing madly around your head, and feel like ‘nothing’s happening’.

2. Inconsistency

Second, you should avoid inconsistency - this means making it a priority to set some time aside each day for your meditation practice. Why? Simply because the more often you meditate, the easier it becomes to quiet the mind and connect with your inner self. If you just do a bit here and now when you're ‘in the mood’, chances are you'll never move beyond that frustrating beginner stage where your mind is jumping around all over the place.

So try committing to meditating every day for at least several weeks before making any judgements about whether it's ‘working’ for you or not.

3. Negativity From Others

Third, you should avoid letting others influence your meditation practice. This may not be an issue for everybody, but meditation is still viewed as a kind of weird thing to do by many people. So if you have others in your life who make disparaging remarks about meditation, you should ignore them. If you let the opinions of others influence you away from doing something you really want to do, chances are you'll end up being miserable, because you're not living in accordance with your real values.

So, resist any attempts by others at derailing you from your meditation practice, and eventually you'll probably find that they’ll come to respect your decision to stick with it - and if they don't, it's really not your problem.

If you're a new meditator, you can make starting a meditation practice much easier if you listen to a brainwave entrainment recording. Such a recording incorporates sounds of specific frequencies, which are designed to guide your brain into a deeply relaxed state. When the brain is relaxed, the chatter of our conscious thoughts naturally slows down, and the absence of this ‘mind chatter’ makes meditation easier and more effective.

Brainwave entrainment is especially valuable for new meditators, because it can be very hard to learn to focus on relax the mind using traditional techniques. This way, the recording gives your brain a kind of ‘crutch’, which can be really useful during the learning process – and eventually your brain will become so used to entering a deep meditative state, that you won’t even need to recording!