Do i just sit down and try to think nothing? do i do breathing exercises? does it actually have benefits?
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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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