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Meditation is easier and more simple than most people believe. Start here and learn the seven steps and one key insight you need to get your meditation practice off to a great start. There is so much to gain. Like the rest of your life.
What’s On Offer
You experience every aspect of life through your mind. Meditation is a simple set of exercises to help you towards the best possible life, whatever that means for you.
For thousands of years people from all cultures have been meditating.
Recently scientists have started to uncover the myriad of ways in which it works and the various benefits.
Most people come to meditation because they’ve heard it is good for relaxation or stress relief. It is. But this is just the icing on the cake that is meditation. In fact we believe that meditation can improve literally every single part of your life – your relationships, your career, creativity, athletic performance, health and more.
Fundamentally all humans want to be happy. That is what this is ultimately about.
Meditation is simple to learn and easy to practice. There are a couple of challenges, but once understood properly these turn into fun exercises much like solving a crossword puzzle or doing sudoku.
You have a simple choice. Do you want to be happy? If so, why not give this ancient, scientifically proven approach a chance.
Here’s a video with the relatively standard introduction to meditation we give at the beginning of many classes. Nine minutes on what mindfulness meditation is really about.
Step One – It’s not what you think
Let go of what you think meditation is all about.
There is a widespread misconception that meditation is hard and that you need to be able to stop your thoughts.
Many people, maybe including you, believe they can’t do it, or that they are no good at it. People believe this because their mind is very active and they can’t control it. They can’t sit still and ‘chill out’ and therefore meditation is not for them.
This belief is wrong.
Step one – see if you can let go of any misunderstanding about meditation. All we’re asking at this point is to merely entertain the possibility that meditation isn’t as hard as you think, and maybe even that you could do this.
Step Two – Breathe
Yes, it is that simple. Try it now. Take a nice, slow, deep breath, and let it out gently and slowly.
Now, that is not quite a meditation. BUT it is REALLY close.
All you have to do to turn that into meditation is simply pay attention to that breath.
So … right now … try it again. Take a nice deep breath in and out, but this time paying attention.
That IS a meditation.
See, you CAN meditate.
Step Three – Repeat
Okay, this is where people often get stuck.
It turns out that holding your attention on something as simple as your breathing is difficult. Within a very short space of time your mind jumps in and gets you thinking about something else.
Many people, far too many people, believe this means they can’t meditate or that they’re no good at it.
This is an incorrect understanding of the process.
Step Four – Becoming familiar with your own mind
What if … instead of thinking that you’re trying to ‘still your mind’ or that you’re trying to hold perfect concentration in some imagined Zen like state … what if you are actually just going to start by paying attention to your breath … and then, simply see what happens next.
What happens next is that your mind jumps in and pulls your attention somewhere else. That’s happening to everyone, not just you.
The important part is simply to notice that your mind took your attention away.
Well done.
This is the first really important discovery in meditation, namely, that your mind is not under your control. Or at least it’s not under your control as much as you might have thought.
What does this have to do with feeling relaxed or helping with stress? We know that people often come to meditation because they want to feel calm, more relaxed, get better sleep, or feel less overwhelmed. And all those things do happen. But all those things are consequences of the process, not the process itself. The process is simpler than that, and as unlikely as it may seem
all we are doing is becoming more familiar with our own minds.
So, if you find that your mind is ‘all over the place’ and that you can’t get it to stay still – it turns out you’re doing it perfectly.
You have accomplished this first part and seen what your mind is doing.
You’re doing great. Hang in there.
Steps Five and Six – Begin Again
Now, and this is the next really useful practice of meditation – when you’ve noticed your mind, and you’ve noticed that you’re not paying attention to the breath anymore, you simply start again.
As you progress with meditation you will learn that increasingly it is a practice of doing less and less. We end up letting go of so many of our habitual, neurotic mental behaviours. And sometimes the instructions can feel a little amorphous when it’s ‘not this’, and ‘not that’. We are so used to ‘doing’ things to get results and here we are somehow trying to ‘not do’ things.
But one thing that is worth ‘doing’ in meditation and really worth getting better at, is this simple act of ‘beginning again’.
Not always as easy as it sounds. We can get very absorbed by our thoughts and we are used to following them wherever they go.
Beginning again is simply choosing to do something different while we are meditating. Instead of just continuing to follow our thoughts, we choose to gently let go of that line of thinking and move our attention back to the next breath. We start again as if it were the very first time we’d ever paid attention to our breathing.
This involves seeing the thoughts you’re having and choosing to let them go.
Just begin again.
Then, when you notice again that your mind has wandered, go to Step Six – begin again.
Step Seven – Patience
Another very simple, and yet often surprisingly difficult step.
The thing is, you’ve developed your current relationship with your mind over years, maybe even decades.
In one meditation session you may well feel a bit better. But you probably want to feel a lot better and you’d like to feel that all the time. Of course you do.
The promise of meditation is that you can.
This has been the experience of millions of people across centuries of doing this, and now modern scientific research backs it up.
Meditation is not hard. It is simple, and it is powerful if you give it a chance. But to give it a chance you do have to do it somewhat regularly.
Generally, if you can do it everyday, or everyday-ish, for ten days to two weeks you are likely to start to see how profoundly this could affect your life. Then, with a bit of support and the odd refresher that we can all use once in a while, you’ll hopefully have this incredibly useful practice to lean on for the rest of your life.
However, we know from our own experience and the testimony of others – this is the hard part of meditation. Not the meditation itself but establishing it as a regular behaviour.
We’re here to help.
Why Meditate?
Discover how and why meditation can help you develop a new relationship with your own mind.
