How to Meditate

Meditation is a wonderful practice. It will quiet your mind, improve all of your abilities, enhance your creativity, bolster your resistance to the stressors in this world, and improve your relationships. Not to mention that it will also bring you more inner peace, which is really what it’s all about. Meditation is quite simple but it takes practice and discipline. Here are the steps:

Sit still in a comfortable position with your spine straight, your head balanced on your spine, and your arms and legs uncrossed (turn off your cell phone first).

Breathe naturally but start to become aware of the sensation of your breathing in and exhaling. Also begin to notice the sounds that you hear, the temperature and feeling of the air, the texture of your clothes against your skin, etc.

Begin to “surrender your thoughts.” The way to do this is to use an “object” or what I call a “vehicle”. The vehicle could be your breath or a mantra (a mantra is a Sanskrit word; feel free to repeat the word “ohm” to yourself out loud first and then silently) – both of which are popular and frequently used in Buddhist practice. Other vehicles are visual cues such as the flame of a candle; focusing on sensations in any part of your body can also be such a vehicle. Continue to focus upon the object, returning your attention to it over and over and over again when you become aware that your mind slips back to those incessant thoughts or images of your "monkey mind."

To be a witness to thoughts and feelings is to rise up above or below (however you perceive it) the level of ego and take it all in from a different plane. A more spacious place, a very still and yet profoundly transformative place.

The answer to so many questions is always the same: be still, breathe, and surrender your thoughts. This is meditation. It’s also mindfulness. These are just words, though. Don’t get caught up in the words. It’s about an activity in which you repeatedly notice and dissociate from your thoughts. You become the observer behind the viewer, the observer behind the hearer and the thinker and the one who feels and analyzes and interprets. You simply witness what’s going on.

This takes practice because it’s 100% antithetical to the way we are trained to use our minds, from the time we’re small children in grade school. That’s why it’s called a “practice”. It’s about being present, being aware of your energy or vibrational frequency, not being controlled by your thoughts and thus, reminding yourself that those thoughts are not, in fact, Who you are.

The transmutation or transformation that can happen does not occur at the level of thought. Eventually something happens. There’s an alchemy that happens. But don't wait for it, look out for it, or judge yourself for whatever your experience is. A big part of the practice is not judging the practice. So it's about letting go - over and over and over again - from one’s mental chatter, from one's ego.

Again, there are different ways to do this. Using an “object” to focus on is the most popular way out of a sea of thoughts and feelings. And again, probably the most popular object is ones breath. Listening, feeling it viscerally, being mindful of it. Another is the inner sensations of the body, essentially the internal energy which may be experienced as a pulse, a wave, a vibration, possibly a sense of warmth or some type of a sensation. We can’t think our way out of our “problems” or out of our mind. As Einstein said, we can’t solve problems using the same consciousness from which they arose. Feeling them is a step in the right direction. Even better still is “vibrating” with them or experiencing them as a type of energy. That is, feeling the energy of your present state and sitting with it. Feel whatever you feel but try not to think about it.

This may not make any sense to you because most of us do it so rarely, if at all. When mental activity returns in the form of a thought, simply notice it, identify that you’re in thought or thinking and deliberately, gently and without reprimand of any kind, return your attention to the “vehicle” or “object” that you have chosen, and travel once again out of the realm of thought.

Don’t worry if this is difficult to do. Also, don’t think of a thought as “bad”. It’s part of our human condition to have a stream of what feels like incessant thoughts. When you let go of a thought, enjoy the sensation as though you are letting go of focusing on a cloud passing above, or seeing a soap bubble popping, revealing the space behind it that it blocked from view. Most importantly, don’t stop doing this practice if you feel you’re not doing it “right” or that it’s “not working”. Those are clever and often successful attempts by your ego to trick you out of being present, to convince you that you're not good at this. That you "can't meditate." Don’t fall for it. The ego would like you to stay in discomfort and a sense of separateness. The ego is actually a function of our illusory sense of separateness.

Start with a mere 5 or 10 minutes. Building up to 30 minutes a day is often recommended; this may feel like an eternity. I can’t stress enough how important it is to simply sit still and be with the energy underlying the feelings and thoughts. You may feel that nothing is happening, that it even feels worse. Remind yourself how much of your life you’ve sedated, controlled, or created drama in order to escape these sometimes uncomfortable vibrations of just simply being present. Finally, try offering yourself some rest from the illusory escape from all the above typical distractions such as television, internet, alcohol, addictions of all kinds, and even the addiction to resentment or pain (also known as the “pain body” coined by Eckhart Tolle in his work).

Give it some time, because your patience with yourself is deeply connected with your compassion for yourself, which is the ultimate healing agent and the path to forgiveness. You may not think that you need to forgive yourself or others but we all do. Because we all have anger, judgment and guilt. And these are what separate us from God, Spirit, or whatever you deem your Higher Power. These emotionally addictive states (anger, judgment, fear, guilt, sadness) are part of most of our habitual processes (unless, of course, one happens to be an enlightened master).

Keep at it. It’s one of the absolute best things you can do for yourself. And you don’t need to buy anything or take workshops or collect self-help books to do it. Begin right where you are. This is the practice of meditation. This is the path.

How to Meditate

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