meditating 101

cultivating the superpower of equanimity and perspective

dear friends,

Happy March!

This month is devoted to the subject of “Surveying Your Inner Landscape,” and if we’re surveying our inner landscape, there’s really no way around meditating. I say this as a person who spent years failing at meditation: my feet fell asleep, I lost count of my breaths, my monkey-mind jumped from one tree to the next, frolicking really. I kept trying, but almost always ended up frustrated and defeated.

Then, I stopped trying altogether for about a decade.

The truth is meditating doesn’t come easily for everyone, maybe not even for most. It certainly didn’t for me. Now, though, I can’t imagine my days without time on my cushion. I’m thoroughly convinced that not only can we all learn to meditate, but, with a little creativity, we can all find meditation practices that suit us perfectly.

Before I jump into the nuts and bolts, it’s worth thinking about why we meditate. My first failed attempts at meditation in my twenties were the result of me thinking I “should” meditate because all the wise and thoughtful people I admired did. When I came back to it in my late thirties, I was a little clearer about why I wanted to meditate — less depression, less anxiety, less stress, and less feeling irritated by things I knew shouldn’t upset me but did. By the time my late forties rolled around, my motivation changed. I meditated because I was curious, I wanted to cultivate equanimity, and I wanted to better understand myself and the world.

And you know what? All the hype is warranted.

As lovely as it would be for us all to head out for a month-long meditation retreat in some warm and beautiful spot on this planet, preferably with lots of good food, most of us don’t even have the time to sit on a cushion for thirty minutes every day. So, the focus of this newsletter is on the most efficient ways I know to reap the benefits of a meditation practice as quickly as possible. And, when you have the time, do more. I hear there’s a great meditation retreat in Bora Bora next September.

Here it is:

(1) Pick your time and place. This step is often given short shrift, but I think it’s key because we’re all creatures of habit. Be ruthlessly honest with yourself about how much time you have and when you have it. In my experience, there’s no substitute for starting the day with calm, clarity, and compassion, but it’s always better to meditate than not to. So, if the only time you have is right before you crawl under the covers, then no worries: your meditation time is five minutes before bedtime. And be consistent. It’s really important to make habit energy work for you. Sure, at first you have to expend some effort, but pretty soon, momentum does a lot of the work. Let it. In a similar way, when you meditate in the same spot each time you’ll start dropping into meditative calm more quickly because, well, Pavlov.

Now, if your life is not structured so that any of this makes sense, please don’t give up on cultivating your meditation practice. There have been stretches of my own life where everything was so up in the air, that I couldn’t carve out time and place either. Give yourself a time range (5-15 minutes), and get it done every day whenever and however you can.

(2) Be intentional in your approach. If you are brand new to meditating, consider using a guided meditation program to get you started. Mindfulness Daily with Tara Brach & Jack Kornfield is a 40-day online training with 10–15 minute lessons, a short talk and guided meditation specifically designed to help you establish a meditation practice. Sharon Salzberg also offers a number of helpful meditation courses and she offers scholarships for those who can’t contribute. You can find an almost endless number of free guided meditations by Tara Brach. She helpfully sorts them into categories — Basic Meditations, Heart Meditations, Open Awareness Meditations and Special Meditations/Reflections — so that you can find exactly what you’re looking for. Rick Hanson, psychologist and Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, also offers meditation courses on his website, along with free live meditations every Wednesday evening.

If don’t want to use guided meditations, spend some time researching. Vipassana (insight), Vedanā (feeling tone), Metta (loving-kindness), or maybe Tonglen (compassion/interbeing)? If you don’t know where to start, Lion’s Roar and Tricycle are well-respected journals for all things Buddhist, the former is more accessible to the novice than the latter. All the experts I listed above also have good old-fashioned paper books that can walk you through everything.

(3) Just do it! This is, of course, the hardest part. If you after a few days, you are still resisting sitting down and actually meditating, re-think your time and place. Make everything easier. Seriously. If you told yourself five minutes on the couch before you pour your first cup of coffee, why don’t you make it two minutes at the kitchen table while the coffee is brewing? The important thing is to start, because once you feel that first glimmer of stillness, what Martha Beck is calling Worldlessness and Oneness, you’ll want more of that in your life.

And if you have NO interest in anything even remotely spiritual, consciousness-altering or awareness-raising, no worries. Your meditation practice is still the best method out there is for cultivating equanimity, wisdom, and peace. Not bad side effects for any habit, I think.

That’s it!

may you be at peace,

alison

p.s.

If you want to do some extracurricular reading, here’s a quick guide to my favorites in this topic area: The Way of Integrity by Martha Beck, Lovingkindness by Sharon Salzberg, My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, The Art of Solitude by Stephen Batchelor, Greater than the Sum of our Parts by Richard C. Schwartz