What is meditation?
To clear up some common misunderstandings… meditation isn’t about relaxing, clearing our head, or escaping from the world. Meditation is an alert state where we observe our mind, practising keeping it focussed on the present moment.
Why meditate?
The first time that you practise sitting it’s likely that your focus will constantly be interrupted with thoughts. By observing our mind we see how much time we spend thinking about pointless, unnecessary and often damaging things. The reason we meditate is to practise decreasing ‘thinking’, instead keeping our mind focussed on the present. We can learn everything we need to know about ourselves by observing our mind and our thinking.
How do I meditate?
First up, your sitting position. The most important factor is to maintain a straight back, this makes it easy to breathe freely and deeply. The best positions like the Lotus and Half-Lotus are very difficult unless you’re super flexible and being able to do these positions is great but not essential. If you’re like me and want to start out with meditation while avoiding leg bending injuries then a chair works fine.
Your chair should be padded, you should sit up straight without using the chair back, keep your back straight at all times. Point your head down as if you’re looking at the floor 6-7 feet in front of yourself, chin tucked in a little. Your eyes should be almost closed, but open a little. You should be in a room where you won’t be distracted – no phone calls, pets, room-mates, etc.
How do I start?
Start out by setting a timer for the length of time you’d like to sit for. If you’re new I’d recommend 5 minutes… trust me this feels like a lot longer! 10-30 minute sessions are the norm, but only for people who are practised in meditating. It’s incredibly tough at first and there’s no reason to make it too hard for yourself, it’s about building up practise. Increase your session times gradually instead.
Start by focussing on your breathing. Count your breaths, one for inhale, two for exhale, three for inhale, and so on. Don’t alter your breathing just be aware of it, focus on it. After you get more experienced with sitting you can focus on your senses too, all senses are in the present moment, you can practise focussing on each of them.
How do I observe my mind?
While counting your breaths you’ll notice that it’s difficult to count ten without your mind being diverted at all. As soon as your mind is diverted you lightly acknowledge the diversion and start counting again from the first breath. It’s important to never be annoyed by noticing that you’ve drifted off, just lightly say to yourself, “I drifted off and was thinking about X again, now I’m going back to current task of focussing on my breathing”. This is called labeling your thoughts and will happen frequently in a session.
It doesn’t matter if your thought is small and pointless like “What will I have for dinner” or big or stressful like “Is my career right for me? Am I wasting my life?”, you just label it ‘thinking about my career’ and let it go, back to breathing. We just acknowledge everything, no matter what it is, and let it go.
Meditation is that simple. You don’t need any CDs, products or extended knowledge. Just sit, breathe and when your mind wanders we return it to the present.
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Tagged: Buddhism, Meditation, Mindfulness, Presence
4 Comments
Tried counting to 10…….. it’s hard!
Cool you gave it a go, Grog.
It starts out tough and gradually gets easier. In Elements of Poker, Angelo relates practise of presence to weightlifting… returning your mind to the present is like doing a rep. Every time you do a rep your mind gets stronger. Persistence and daily practise are key to building mental strength.
I tried it before my session and really enjoyed it. 5 minutes was actually up sooner than I expected it to be.
Any other suggestions? I find my mind wandering like crazy, just take note and take another deep breath I guess.
Do you listen to music when you play?
Hey Jordan,
That’s good that you find 5 minutes easy, you could give a 10min session a go. It’s totally normal for your mind to wander a lot when you start out, it’s a pretty good sign that there is work to be done
Yes, the correct thing to do is to lightly take note, “I was thinking about this subject” and return focus to your breathing.
As a next step I’d suggest paying attention to the individual thoughts that are arising. Are they useful? Are the harmful? Do certain thoughts re-occur a lot?
By paying attention to what the thought is (this is when we label it before return to breathing) we become aware of what our mind is bringing up. We can often declare it as useless, wasteful or negative or we might realise we’re spending a lot of time thinking about something that we need to deal with. Gradually through the practise of watching our thoughts we find that the thinking lessens and lessens as a high volume of it is useless or negative and we learn to stop thinking about it.
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle is a great recommended reading if you’d like to explore things more. I’m going to be writing a lot more on this because there’s a lot to cover, thanks for your feedback, it gives me a good idea of the direction to go in for future articles. And feel free to ask any more questions, I’d be interested to hear how you progress with it.
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While playing poker I focus better with silence, but my apartment isn’t always quiet so I usually play ambient music to cancel out other noises. I’ve got a big playlist that I shuffle, including a lot of the albums from here… http://bazclark.com/2010/03/beats-to-grind-to/