Do i just sit down and try to think nothing? do i do breathing exercises? does it actually have benefits?
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Everything you think and feel is brain activity. Activating your brain promotes similar activation later. Circuits that aren’t used get cut.
There are hundreds of meditation techniques, but they all work to actively create activity patterns we find desirable. With enough repetition, you’ll maintain those favorable patterns all day.
Second question first: yes, it has scientifically proven benefits. Namely stress relief and everything that goes along with that (which is a lot).
Anyone who tells you there’s only one way to meditate is wrong.
The common thing is that you’re basically making your mind concentrate on one specific thing.
Sitting in a quiet place and reciting a mantra works for some people but it’s far from the only way. Some people meditate like that. Some people concentrate on music. Some people walk. There’s even a form of meditation where you sit down and concentrate on _everything that is making you uncomfortable_, like that random itch, or that buzzing noise, or the fly that has now landed on you, etc.
You can try all kinds of things and see what works for you.
A guy on YouTube said you can’t just meditate. Because your mind wanders and sometimes it will venture into crazy often scary thoughts. He called it the monkey mind. His trick was to work with the monkey mind. You give it work to keep it busy so it doesn’t have time to wander. Either counting or breathing.
Meditation is a practice – in the sense that it’s something you DO, not something you ACHIEVE. So you’ll find (especially if you’re going the route of simply sitting in silence and trying to quiet your mind) that your brain keeps wandering off on tangents, thinking up random things, flashing up thoughts and memories and all kinds of things. This doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. The aim of meditation is, at least in part, to build your skill in a) noticing the fact you’ve gone on a mental diversion and b) gently tugging on your mind’s leash to bring it back to a still point.
ELI5: your brain is a bit like an excited puppy. When you take a puppy out for a walk, it has to learn to stay close by and listen – but at first it’s running around all over the place. Slowly, over lots of walks and gently encouraging it back to your side every time, your puppy gets better at staying close by and not wandering off every time it sees something interesting. Meditation trains your brain not to wander off.
Meditation is, at heart, being aware of the present moment. Like right now, this very second, you reading this, take a moment, take a deep breath, and bring your attention to wherever you are. Just look, listen, smell, what’s there. Feel the temperature of the air. The pressure of your butt and legs on your seat. The feeling of your clothes against your skin.
That’s meditating. You’ve just meditated.
The thing is that, you probably won’t be able to be aware of the present moment for long. Within seconds your brain will start having thoughts about everything you see, and then thoughts about the thoughts and then it will start chasing associations from place to place and before you know it you’ll be lost in thought and won’t even realize it’s happened.
Humans spend most of their lives lost in thought. It’s just how we’re wired.
Meditation is the process of learning to get better at realizing you’re lost in thought, and bringing your attention to the present moment again.
Often, this takes the form of sitting and focusing on your breath. The breath makes for a very convenient object of focus because it’s always there and always changing.
And then, when you realize you’ve lost focus (and you will, everyone does), you gently, without anger or judgement, return your focus to the breath.
Losing your focus isn’t failing to meditate. Meditation is being aware of the present moment and that moment, for you, contained ‘lost in thought.’
For me, regular meditation offers two salient “off-cushion” benefits:
1. Getting better and being aware of the present moment means I’m more present for my own life. Being present for moments that I would normally spend lost in thought means I experience more of each day. Time slows down and evens out. Every moment takes on an importance that it wouldn’t have otherwise. I feel more grateful for things I would otherwise take for granted.
2. It puts space between how I feel and how I act. Just because I’m angry or sad doesn’t mean anyone is to blame and it doesn’t mean I have to do anything about it. My feelings are just the weather, just something else that’s happening in this moment. If you can put your attention onto your feelings, onto the bodily sensations of them, then you get a lot more control over how you act and react. Humans are deeply, profoundly oriented to avoid unpleasant things. But if you can train yourself to focus on the unpleasantness, to give your full attention, then it loses a lot of its power to dictate your actions. Like, you wake up to four missed calls from your asshole ex and you know you have to call back and you know it’ll be a shitshow. But, instead groaning and spending the day trying not to think about it (and maybe being snippy and terse with everyone), you put your attention on the anxiety, fear, annoyance, anger, reluctance. And once you move toward them, the suffering drains from them and you just make a decision about when you’ll call back.
If anyone is interested in a simple, barebones approach to the practice, I recommend the work of David Cain, and his blog Raptitude. He’s written a number of small, easy to read and easy to understand books about how to get started meditating. They were instrumental in establishing my practice.
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