You might find mindfulness meditation is a great way to start your workday. By the time you arrive at work in the morning, you may already be feeling stressed out. After a hectic hour or two preparing the kids for school or haggling with your partner or dealing with some emergency at home, followed by a commute through rush-hour traffic, you may have gotten your workday off to a harrowing start.

When most folks first consider taking up the practice of meditation, they usually have a few questions they want to have answered — and when they get started, they come up with a few more. Here are the answers to ten common questions to get you started on your journey. Will meditation make me too relaxed or spaced out to succeed at work or school?

Besides overcoming separation, basic meditation practices contribute to the healing process in a number of essential ways. For some help with meditation, check out these basic meditation practices. Love and connectedness As Dean Ornish, MD, reveals in his groundbreaking research, love is more important than any other factor in the healing process, including diet and exercise.

Mediation offers healing power through imagery. In her book Staying Well with Guided Imagery, psychotherapist and guided-imagery pioneer Belleruth Naparstek cites extensive research that establishes three basic principles behind the healing power of imagery. These principles help explain the effectiveness of meditations that use imagery extensively.

If you’re a budding meditator, family life poses a twofold challenge. On the one hand, you may feel inclined to invite, encourage, or even coerce your loved ones to meditate with you. On the other, you may find that the people closest to you disturb your fragile, newfound peace of mind in ways that no one else can.

Anything you do or experience can provide you with an opportunity to practice mindfulness meditation. But you may want to begin with some of your usual activities — the ones you may be doing now on automatic pilot while you daydream, space out, or obsess. The truth is, even the most routine tasks can prove enjoyable and enlivening when you do them with wholehearted care and attention.

At some point, you may find yourself in need of a meditation teacher. Like other things in life, you can only get so far after reading a book and watching a few videos. The same is true for meditation. You may have discovered something wonderful with meditation, but know that you can’t get any further without help.

If you choose to seek a meditation teacher, make sure you know what you are looking for before you begin. If you’d like to play tennis but don’t know how, what do you do? You can watch other people play, maybe buy a book or two, and then head out to the court yourself and start practicing. But after you’ve mastered the basics, you may want to take a class or get some personal instruction to help you refine your stroke or eliminate the mistakes you’ve picked up along the way.

All the great meditative traditions agree: Meditating with others confers extraordinary benefits that enhance your individual practice and accelerate your personal and spiritual unfolding. Buddhists regard the community of practitioners as one of the three jewels or treasures of practice, along with the awakened teacher and the truth itself.