What do you do when you meditate? (1/4)

When I started to meditate, it was not obvious at all to me what I was actually supposed to do, or how to do any of it.

Of course, there are plenty of instructions out there on ‘how to meditate’. If you browse the internet or read any of the books on meditation, you will come across instructions that probably look something like this:

(1)  Find a calm and comfortable seat

(2)  Focus your attention ( e.g. on your breadth, your heartbeat or on some mantra or other)

(3)  Return to your focus when you get distracted.

The problem with these types of instructions, is that they assume you already know how to meditate: they describe what meditating looks like, rather than how to do it, let alone how to learn it, or improve.

What’s worse, they make it sound like it should be easy. It’s a bit like describing balancing on a rope as: ‘get on the rope, balance for as long as you can, when you fall, try again’. Not so helpful, unless you already know how to balance.

But meditation is a lot more complex than balancing on a rope, as it requires you not only to pay attention to and orchestrate your body, but also your mind, your thoughts and your emotions. Differently put, you can still practice balancing on a rope when you are deep in thought, distracted or feeling angry, whereas with meditation, you cannot. Also, for balancing on a rope or other more complex motor skills, its a lot more obvious when you are falling vs when you are on the rope, whereas for meditation it can be tricky to even know what focus ‘feels like’.

Brought together, this makes meditation very easy to describe but very difficult to do, and instructions like the above belie the complexity of what is going on. Like there are many different ways you can fall off a rope, there are many ‘individual’ skills that make up a stable meditation practice and depending on which your ‘weakest link’ is, you may trip off and lose focus in different ways.

So in this series of blog posts I want to describe what you actually do when you meditate by describing its main constituent parts in some more depth, why it can be challenging and what makes it so rewarding.

(1)  Finding a calm and comfortable seat – your body

(2)  Finding focus – your thoughts

(3)  Returning to focus – your emotions

Continue reading for part (2) - finding a calm and comfortable seat.