Photo by Daz Smith
Why meditate? On one level, meditation is a tool. It can help combat stress, fosters physical health, helps with chronic pain, can make you sleep better, feel happier, be more peaceful, as well as be present. But on a deeper level, meditation is a doorway into the unknown. It can help us get a sense of the mystery of who we are.
When you start meditating, you will notice how unruly the mind is. I remember being quite shocked by this! I noticed that my mind was all over the place. Profound thoughts about my past or future jostled with mundane thought clips about what groceries I needed to buy. Some time afterwards I would come too and notice that I had spend 15 minutes running a painful memory over and over. It was like sitting in a crazy cinema!
So, if you’re starting out with meditation, please don’t beat yourself up about your wild mind. It is a natural condition. In time you will learn to work kindly with the barrage of thoughts and you will some clarity and peacefulness.
Here are some simple tips on how to start meditating. Maybe those of you who already practise meditation could please add your comments of what has worked for you.
1. Posture
Whether you sit on a chair or cross-legged on the floor, make sure that your spine is upright with head up. If you are slumped your mind will drift. Mind and body are intertwined. If your body is well-balanced, your mind will also be in balance. To straighten up, imagine that your head is touching the sky.
2. Eyes
Try and keep you eyes open. Open eyes allow you to be more present. Just lower your eyes and let your gaze be sort. If you close your eyes you will be more likely to drift away on thoughts and stories. However, it’s important to do what is comfortable for you. Some people find closing their eyes much more effective. It’s good to experiment and see what feels best for you.
2. Focus
In ordinary consciousness we are hardly ever present. For example, sometimes we drive the car on autopilot while being preoccupied with thoughts. Suddenly we arrive at our destination and don’t remember anything about the drive!
So, meditation is a wonderful way of waking up to our life. Otherwise we miss most of our experiences because we are somewhere else in our mind! Let’s take a look at what focus is. In ordinary life, we tend to equate focus with concentration. That’s like using the mind like a concentrated beam of light. But in meditation, that kind of mind isn’t helpful. It’s too sharp and edgy. To focus in meditation means to pay soft attention to whatever you place in the centre of awareness. I suggest using the breath as a focus. It’s like a natural door that connects ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Zen Master Toni Packer says:
Attention comes from nowhere. It has no cause. It belongs to no one
3. The breath
Paying attention to the breath is a great way to anchor yourself in the present moment.
Notice your breath streaming in and out. There’s no need to regulate the breath - just let it be natural.
4. Counting you breath
If you are having difficulties settling, you can try counting the breath - which is an ancient meditation practice. On your outbreath, silently count “one”, then “two”, and up to “four”. Then return to “one”. Whenever you notice your thoughts have strayed far away or you find yourself counting “thirtythree”, simply return to “one”. In this way, “one” is like coming home to the present moment. It’s good to return without a backward glance.
5. Thoughts
When you notice thoughts, gently let them go by returning yous focus to the breath. Don’t try and stop thoughts; this will just make you feel agitated. Imagine that they are unwelcome visitors at your door: Acknowledge their presence and politely ask them to leave. Then shine the soft light of your attention on your breath.
6. Emotions
It’s difficult to settle into meditation if you are struggling with strong emotions. This is because some emotions tend to breed stories in the mind. Especially anger, shame and fear create stories that repeat over and over in the mind. Anger and shame make us keep looking at past events of the past. Fear looks at the future with stories that start with, “What if…”
The way to deal with strong emotions in meditation is to focus on the body feelings that accompany the emotion. For example, this could be the tight band of fear around the chest or the hot roiling of anger in the belly. Let go of the stories and refocus on your body. In this way you are honouring your emotions but not becoming entangled in stories.
7. Silence
Silence is healing. I know that there are is a lot of ‘meditation music’ around, but nothing beats simple silence. Otherwise the music or sounds on the tape just drown out the chatter in your mind. When we sit in silence we actually get to experience what our mind is doing. There is steadiness and calmness that comes from sitting in silence. In time outer and inner silence meet and you come to rest in the moment.
8. Length
Start with 10 minutes and only sit longer if you feel that that is too short. Don’t force yourself to meditate longer if you are not ready to do that. In time you might like to extend your meditation to 25 minutes. That’s a length that allows you to settle your mind without causing too much stress on your body. Most importantly, shrug off any ‘shoulds’. Some people enjoy sitting for an hour at a time. Others find that they can’t sit longer than 10 minutes. Do what feels right for you!
9. Place
It’s lovely to create a special place to sit. You can even make a shrine or an altar that you can face when you sit in meditation. You might like to place a candle on your altar and objects that have meaning to you. It’s lovely to find objects for your altar as you walk. Maybe you find stones, or seashells, or flowers that speak to you.
10. Enjoyment
Most of all it’s important to enjoy meditation. You might like to try sitting with a hint of a smile. Be kind to yourself. Start sitting just a little each day. It’s helpful to establish a daily habit.
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Read about Boundless Kindness meditation: Save the world - One Breath at a Time
A laugh-out-loud report on meditation: Deep Meditation Happens
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Posted on 18-04-2008 | Copyright Mary Jaksch 2008.
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Great advice. There may be other “how to meditate” posts on the web, but this is one of the best I’ve read.
For me, fighting the battle to quiet my mind is a terrific learning experience. I find that some thoughts melt away easily and other thoughts, images, music are more stubborn and return frequently. Honestly, I’m not 100% sure what it means, but those “stubborn” thoughts provide interesting insight into what my mind holds dearly … or at a minimum those thoughts provide insight into what distracts my mind.
I sit cross legged on a pillow on the floor and close my eyes and focus on my breath until I find “clarity” and a quiet mind. I never (I can’t) fall asleep sitting up. It doesn’t happen every time, but occasionally, I enjoy a deep, peaceful, trance-like state that completely rejuvenates me.
Thanks for this down to earth, practical and to the point post. It is very helpful to me.
I guess I am one of these people with a very busy mind. Somehow in the past I got attached to the idea that meditation ment allowing no thoughts at all. This brought me in very (self)torturelike realms of the mind. A long time what I thought of as meditation was a painful process, always fighting fire with fire and it seemed to me that things were only getting worse, no blue skies at all.
Somehow along the way the focus changed and it came to me that I could look at thoughts as if they were living creatures (maybe they are). As I love birds very much - I even worked for a couple of years monitoring en inventorying breeding birds - I like to look at them as birds. They behave like them, sometimes they flock together, sometimes there are many, sometimes few and sometimes they don’t seem to be there. There are all kinds of species. Some are there almost always, some others come by only now and then. They even have there own biotopes. Some prefer anger-like biotopes, others like self pity. They even have there own songs.
Since I look at thoughts this way, not forbidding them anymore, nor endorsing them, meditation is happening now and then and sometimes happiness and simple beeing are just there. The focus includes now the sky in witch the birds are flying.
Later I came across this same idea of birding on the website of the Ordinary Mind Zendo, which made me smile of recognition and also made me wonder how seldom really new thoughts are born. Mostly they are the same old stuff.
I still prefer the more active kinds of meditation, like walking, doing the dishes and working in the garden, as they are emptying my mind almost by accident. Simple sitting on a chair is sometimes still a torturelike experience for me, but these painful periods are shrinking.
thank you for your thoughtful comment, Mike. I agree that getting a glimpse of what kind of thoughts run around our mind like mice in a treadmill is important. It shows us the direction we are taking in life. For example, if we feel a bit grumpy, we’ll find a lot of low-level angry thoughts in the mind.
I love your analogy of thoughts as birds! That’s a creative way of working with thoughts.
In your comment you also mention that you prefer active meditation. Sometimes it helps to do some seated meditation at the end of some active meditation, like yoga, walking or gardening. You might find that meditation is then easeful and satisfying. Maybe you could try that and let us know what you experience?
Thank you for being a strong contributor at GoodlifeZen!
Thanks so much for the wise post!! This is greatly appreciated.
This is an amazing post. I loved it and it was extremely helpful. I used to meditate around one year ago but had to stop. I always find it a little bit hard to concentrate while sitting, so I decided to do it lying down on my bed with my eyes closed. I don’t have such a hard time monitoring my thoughts I guess because I’ve been practising counting my breath for a few years now… i have never felt asleep while meditating and even if I set a 15 minutes top time for meditating, I usually end up meditating up to 30 minutes. I prefer to do it with music most of the time. I usually meditate thinking about a beautiful place or a lovely family situation from the past or that I want in the future. If there’s a place I want to visit, then I imagine all the feelings and if is a future relation or any other experience, I imagine it as vivedly as possible. It’s being working miracles for me, so I always recomend my friends to do it also. I have in my wall in front of my computer 2 thoughts that help me in every situation: “If you can imagine it, you can acheive it. If you can dream it, you can become it” and “The most powerful thing mankind possesses is POWER THOUGHT”… I hope they can help you as much as they do to me
Indeed it is much more easy for me to sit after a period of fysical effort. In Holland we have a saying ‘It is a good rest after the work is done’, meaning that after the work is done you enjoy more a well earned rest. Thought is satisfied and circles around the job done, easily willing to stay with the moment, not drifting away.
By the way, I love the new look of the website.
Thank you for your encouragment! I think many people want to meditate but don’t know how to do it.
Your comment about meditating lying down is very interesting.
Many years ago I was in a formal Zen retreat in the outback of Australia. I bent down to pick up a sock and my back went into spasm and I fell to the floor. From then out I had to do the retreat lying down at the back of the hall.
I found it very difficult because I kept on going to sleep. But it was very relaxing 
I agree that it’s much easier to settle deeply if you do something physical first.
I sometimes think that at the end of the day - if we spend a lot of time sitting down - there is so much unexpressed energy in our body that we get twitchy when sitting still.
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