A beginners guide to meditation.
What are we doing here?
Have you ever stopped to ask that question? Have you ever stopped at all?
It’s quite a funny thing to notice ourselves. Our fidgety, impatient, bored selves.
When we start to notice, we find all sorts of interesting nuggets. We’re tense. We’re worried. and we’re almost incapable of sitting still and doing nothing … unless we’ve thoroughly exhausted ourselves.
Meditation is a weird thing.
We practice sitting and attending to something other than doing.
We learn something magnificent in the process, which is that part of us is always doing and part of us is aware that we’re doing it.
As we begin to make our self … our story … an object in our awareness, the game begins to change. This is when we can unhook from the stress response and drop into the present moment deeply. We recognize something fundamental about who we are and what we’re about.
By making this duality clear, we become whole.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Why do you want to meditate?
You probably wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t already have a sense that meditation is good for you. It’s now been studied by science enough to know that it will do all sorts of good things for us.
Most people want to start meditating to relax … seek a peaceful respite from the crazy work day, crazy life, and out of control world.
That’s all good.
Here is a short list of what you can look forward to by getting started:
Reduced Stress
Emotional Balance
Increased Focus
Reduced Pain
Reduced Anxiety
Increased Creativity
Reduced Depression
Increased Memory
Increased Compassion
Increased Productivity
But suspect that you’ve heard all of that before.
You’re more likely reading this to see if you can get some instruction about this most simple thing that is so incredibly difficult.
So let’s do that.
How to meditate.
There are many ways to meditate and yet all of them ask one thing of you.
Attention.
I like to think of meditation as a training ground for paying attention and managing the nervous system.
Most of the time, our attention is taken by the many, many wonderful delights of our senses. The main culprit, of course, is the sixth sense… our sense of self. This is our idea of ourselves. Our story. Our thoughts.
The moment we are attending to our thoughts, our story, we automatically begin to tense and defend that story. Our nervous system moves into stress.
Check your breath right now. You will notice that you’re either barely breathing or breathing shallowly into your chest. This is the way our body breathes when we’re under stress.
Meditation helps us focus away from thinking… from ourselves… and reorients our attention to something deeper.
When we lose our self … we relax.
But that’s the why again.
So here’s how. We can do this right here and right now.
Notice your breath again.
Now, allow your breath to fall into your belly. Relax as you breathe in and allow the belly to move outwards.
This is a belly breath and can become the cornerstone of your meditation practice.
So there. You just meditated for a moment. You focused your attention on your breath to the exclusion of other inputs like thinking.
That’s focused attention, which is the major muscle that you will continue to strenghten.
All you have to do is do this again and again in sequence. Link them together…. and you are meditating.
Now, of course, as you try to link them together you will be distracted by… well… everything. Once you notice that you’ve been distracted, come back to focusing on your breath.
That’s the basic instruction.
You get two immediate benefits.
First, you learn to breathe into your belly, which instructs the unconscious nervous system that you are safe … as that’s how you breathe when you are sleeping. So you relax and have the opportunity to go within instead of defending what’s “out there.”
Second, you have momentarily focused your attention on something other than all the distracting and delightful thoughts, images, sounds, etc. that you are generally attending to.
Now do this with intention again and again.
To practice:
Find a place where you can sit without too much distraction. If you’re at your computer, turn off notifications and make sure that you’re comfortable.
If you like, set a timer. I used the app Insight Timer (look for my meditations there). To start, do no more than 5 minutes.
Keep your back relatively straight and if possible cross your legs of have your feet on the floor.
Close your eyes and notice yourself.
Notice the body, the tension, the breath.
Practice belly breathing.
Put all of your attention on the sensation of breathing - the sound, the physicality. You can even visually imagine a breath coming in and out of your body.
When your attention gets taken from you (think about that linguistically to begin to get the duality of awareness and story), simply acknowledge that you are distracted and bring your attention back to your breath.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Do five minutes every day this week and you have a meditation practice!
If you’d like a head start you can try my FREE Seven Day Meditation Training. It’s helpful in many ways:
These are guided meditations that make it easy on you… just follow along.
They’re only about 5 minutes with a lot of instruction.
You’ll get a deep sense of the value of meditation and get instant results.
Good luck!
Feel free to contact me with any questions at all: jr at jeremyrothenberg.com
🙏🏼