How to start meditating

The Rut. (bigeyedeer); Headspace.com (text); Amber Larson, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

The Rut. (bigeyedeer.wordpress.com)

I think I'm ready to begin a meditation practice and experience the many benefits it has to offer.

There may be one issue, however: I might not know how to start meditating. With so many different meditation techniques and traditions to try, it’s natural to feel unsure or even silly at first.

But here’s what we need to know about how to meditate.

Get started: basics

Most meditations begin by sitting in a quiet place, closing the eyes, calming the mind, and putting attention/focusing on the breath.

There’s more to meditating than sitting quietly and breathing. When we meditate, we are essentially cultivating awareness and compassion. We are training the mind to stop being so easily distracted and instead be more focused in and on the present moment.

Using the breath as our anchor in the moment, we sit and gradually learn to let thoughts and feelings come and go.

Of course, it’s completely normal when we start to meditate for the mind to jump all over the place, to wander untamed. The mind’s nature is to generate thoughts, so it’s going to think them:

Meditation is not about stopping thoughts (the "monkey mind" of discursive trains of thoughts). We sit and practice to observe the thinking without getting caught up in the content of the thoughts and emotions.

We learn to tame this restlessness by developing an awareness for those moments when our attention has wandered off. Each time we notice we’re distracted, we build our awareness, and we bring our attention back to the breath. More

Five things that will hinder meditation

1. Sensual desire: mind will wander to the pleasure of the senses, past and future.
2. Anger: ill will, annoyance, and cruelty — long simmering resentments — will come up.
3. Sleepiness: sloth and torpor, bodily exhaustion and mental dullness, will overwhelm us.
4. Restlessness: too much energy, eagerness, expectations, disappointments, greed, envy, jealousy, ruffled impatience may take the place of sleepiness with monkey mind angst and over-efforting.
5. Skeptical doubt: doubt, wrong views, questioning, philosophizing, ratiocination may arise.

Maybe in knowing these are to be expected, the antidotes to them can be employed to overcome them and succeed in experiencing meditation.