When you think of your wellness and detox plan, green juice, salads, and saunas might be some of the first things to come to mind. But detox, as we understand it, is a multilayered process. And it’s meant to address every level of your being in ways that you might not anticipate when you’re first starting out. Juicing, colonics, and dry brushing are just a few tools that help detoxify the body, but mindfulness practices can help you address what’s going on upstairs — as in the stew of thoughts and thinking patterns that occupy your mind. Essentially, meditation is detox for your mind. Mindfulness can help you gain mastery over your thoughts and mental patterns, so that you can access greater peace and awareness in your life.

Just as cleaning up the body’s colon, cells, and tissues can bring you increased mental calm, learning to examine, shift, and clarify your thinking patterns via meditation can also help bring the body into a state of balance. Research shows that meditation can help reduce blood pressure, lessen the symptoms of stress and anxiety, and may help ease fatigue, chronic pain, and mood disorders. Cleaning up toxic beliefs and thought patterns is every bit as essential to good health as colonics and a healthy diet are. And in order to really manifest your full potential in life, getting a handle on negative thought patterns that may be holding you back is key. Meditation and physical detox exist within a beautiful feedback loop: Meditation can help strengthen your commitment to health-promoting choices by easing anxiety and negative thinking, while a cleansed physical state can help heighten the clarifying effects of your meditation practice. Detoxing on both the physical and mental levels works in a synergistic way to bring peace and balance to your entire system of being.

If you’ve never meditated and you’re wondering where to start, you have options. There are various meditation methods, such as taoist, you can try, and yoga, which is, in part, a system of movement meditation, can also do wonders in terms of your overall health.   

By helping you focus inwardly as you learn to observe, examine, and release negative thinking patterns over time, meditation can be an essential component to your detox protocol. Learning to meditate isn’t super difficult, but it can take a little time to achieve deep shifts in your consciousness, so be patient with your process (investing in some sessions with a meditation teacher can also be helpful).

In the meantime, the positive effects of your meditation practice can be felt virtually instantly — a greater sense of focus and calm increase incrementally with practice. Even just five minutes a day of meditation can be a great place to start. As you advance in your practice, you might find that you want to increase your meditation time as you go. But, it’s less about the amount of time spent meditating, and more about the positive effects that you’re experiencing from your practice. Additionally, you can actually use any activity to practice mindfulness: Walking, making your morning green juice, cooking, gardening, and art projects, for instance, can all increase your sense of mindfulness and presence. Bringing your attention to your breath, as you fully immerse yourself in your activity with total attention, strengthens your mindfulness practice as you go.

No matter what method you choose, practicing meditation is a powerful way to cleanse your mind of negative thoughts over time, while also assisting your body in its healing process. There really is nothing like regular meditation to amplify the healing potential of your detox program — on every level of your being.