How to meditate. Part 1 of 4.

You can think about the benefits of meditation or how the mind works for as long as you want. Still, there's nothing like trying to meditate to show you how stubborn and wild the mind can be. Buddhists say that the mind is like a monkey that jumps from branch to branch, from plan to memory, thought to emotion, sight to sound, and never stays in one place. Some modern teachers like to use the analogy of a naughty puppy that keeps going from one place to another without thinking and peeing on the carpet wherever it goes. If you know what it's like to train a puppy: you can't beat it up or sit on it until it agrees to do what you say. The same is true for your mind. If you try to calm your mind down by forcing it, you just make it messier and go nowhere fast, like a dog chasing its tail. Instead, meditating means gently bringing your mind back to a simple point of focus over and over again. In this post, you can learn how to meditate on your breath, which is one of the most common ways to meditate. You will also learn mindfulness techniques, balancing relaxation and alertness and extending your meditation to include welcoming the full range of present-moment experiences. Strangely, the mundane, repetitive, and seemingly insignificant act of paying attention to your breath can eventually lead to all the glamorous benefits that meditation is said to offer, such as less stress, better performance, a greater appreciation and enjoyment of life, a deeper connection with your essential being, and even advanced meditative states, such as unconditional love or transformative insights into the nature of existence.

But first you need to take the first step. Putting your focus on yourself. As the saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. In the case of meditation, this simple but important step involves turning your mind away from its usual focus on outside events or, just as often, on the story it tells you about outside events and toward your inner sensory experience. If you're like most people, you're so focused on what's going on around you—the look in other people's eyes, the voices of family and co-workers, the latest news on the radio, the messages on your computer screen—that you forget to pay attention to what's going on in your mind, body, and heart. Popular culture is meant to get you to look for happiness and satisfaction. Even the smallest act of self-awareness can seem like a huge challenge in a world like ours, where everything is so confusing and attention grabbing. Just turn your mind around for a few minutes and pay attention to what you're sensing and feeling right now. Notice how hard it is for you to move your attention from the outside world to your simple sense experiences. Notice how quickly your mind jumps from thought to thought and image to image, making you the main character in a story. Because these habits are so deeply rooted, it can take a lot of courage and patience to do something as simple as bringing your attention back again and again to something inside you, like your breath. You might be afraid of what you'll find if you go somewhere you don't know much about or of what you'll miss if you turn inward, even for a short time. But this change from the outside to the inside is the simple but radical move that meditation needs.

As I talk about turning inward, the change I'm offering has more than one part. You don't have to get caught up in the meaning of what you're sensing, thinking, or feeling. Instead, you can focus on how you're experiencing it or the fact that you're experiencing it. Instead of getting lost in your thoughts or daydreaming, you can watch how your mind jumps from thought to thought or just notice that you're thinking. Instead of getting stuck on your fear or what you think it means or is trying to tell you, you can notice how the waves of tension move through your belly or what you're feeling. Outer to inner. First, you need to balance your tendency to focus on the outside by paying close attention to what's happening inside. Over time, you'll be able to bring the same level of awareness to all of your experiences, whether they are inside or outside of you.

The difference between second-hand experience and direct experience is even more helpful than between inner and outer experience. Second-hand experience has been filtered and warped by the mind. It's usually about thoughts about the past or future, while direct experience is only in the present and can be accessed through the senses. In meditation, you also turn your attention away from the story your mind makes up about your experience and toward the experience itself.

Almost all the time you're awake, you're rushing from one task, project, or activity to the next. Do you remember what it's like just to be, like you did when you were a child, whiling away a summer afternoon just playing or lying in the grass? Meditation gives you a chance to make this important change from doing to being.

Mind-body medicine tells us, and yogis and sages have told us for thousands of years that your body, mind, and heart are all one seamless and inseparable unit. When your mind keeps jumping from worry to worry like a monkey, your body responds by tightening and tensing, especially in the throat, heart, solar plexus, and belly. When the pain is bad enough, it makes you feel something, like fear, anger, or sadness. Meditation connects you to your direct experience and, ultimately, to a realm of pure being beyond the mind. As a result, your body naturally relaxes while your mind becomes more focused. But if you're just starting, you might not feel this natural calm for days or weeks. So, it can help to try one of the following techniques before you meditate, especially if you tend to be very tense.

Relaxing your body has great benefits in and of itself, but it won't stay relaxed until you can work with your mind. If you've never tried to relax your body on purpose before, try the Deep relaxation meditation in this post. The meditation takes at least 15 minutes to finish, so you probably won't do it every time you meditate. However, it does show you how to relax your body part by part. When you do this exercise a few times, your body will remember what it feels like to be deeply relaxed. You can move on to one of the five-minute relaxations I describe later. The Deep Relaxation method is marvellous for sleep. If you have difficulty falling asleep try this method and see how effective it is.

Come back tomorrow for part 2.

Be well.

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