How to Start Meditating

image via HaPe_Gera on Flickr

When I was in actual college, I was fortunate enough to study abroad in Oxford, England for several months of my junior year.  It was one of the most joyful periods in my life.  I had so much gratitude for being there and interest in everything novel that I relished each experience. A simple trip to the grocery store was endlessly interesting. Vegemite?  Bagging your own groceries?  Fascinating.  A walk through the countryside felt like the adventure of a lifetime, with each English garden and meadow a surprise.

Some new experiences were more than fun—they were practically spiritual experiences.  I remember my first trip to London, pulling up in the bus into Trafalgar Square.  The sounds and sights of the traffic, buildings, people, and sky were all so vivid that my thoughts seemed to turn off, and all I could do was experience what my senses were telling me in that moment.  I was so attuned to that exact second in time that I felt more alive than I ever had.

Afterwards, the desire to re-connect with that feeling of being immersed in the moment stayed with me. When I returned to college for my senior year and a started course in Buddhism, I found the word for what I had experienced while abroad: Mindfulness.

I was thrilled to learn that mindfulness was something that could be cultivated through the practice of meditation, much like physical health can be cultivated through good eating habits.  Heck, you didn’t even have to be Buddhist per se to appreciate the wisdom of Buddhist philosophy and knowledge about meditation.

Veteran meditators told me about not only how they had so many more days of feeling like they relished life, but also that they were less prone to their impulses and ruminative thoughts.  It was also encouraging to learn that practicing meditation wasn’t something all that mystical or new-agey—there was no holding Healing Crystals strategically over one’s Energy Centers.  Meditation was just sitting and trying to pay attention to one’s breath.  Simple in principle, if not in practice.

So I started meditating regularly, culminating that year in a weekend-long silent Zen retreat with a Japanese master.  It did make me feel more centered and aware.  Like lots of new habits, my meditation practice fell by the wayside when life got in the way.  I graduated from college with a serious boyfriend that I would later marry, and moved across the country to be with him and start a new dream job.

Fast forward a decade or so, and nowadays meditation has been on my incomplete “life to-do” list much the way that regularly taking omega-3 supplements and flossing twice a day has been.  I can see the consequences of not living my life with full attention to the moment: I am on automatic pilot much of the time.  I miss so many opportunities every day for relishing life, and for appreciating all that I have.  I’m forever losing my keys or my cell phone, and wondering how I drove across town without even noticing I did it.  That’s why I included Spiritual and Existential Studies in my Spring semester of GUU.

For the past three weeks, I’ve been reading about meditation and mindfulness in Life with Full Attention by Maitreyabandhu, and practicing some daily mindfulness by writing in a journal.  It’s time now for me to start regularly meditating and to try to build this into the new routines I’m structuring for my life.   Today, I sat down and meditated for the first time in nearly a decade.  As I’m looking to re-start my habit, I thought I would share some of what I know about getting started with meditation for both my own benefit, and hopefully for that of readers also.  I have seen a lot of interest in this topic around the blogs, from Michele’s ongoing discussion of Mindful Eating on Healthy Cultivations, to Karen’s interest in starting to meditate on Waisting Time.

Here are a few things I know about starting a meditation practice:

This is Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk. His smiling face says it all--this is one happy, peaceful dude.

1)      Get some guidance. Even though meditation is simple in theory, it’s much easier with the help of the experts.  At the very least, read or listen to the words of one of the modern authors on the subject.  I’m really enjoying Maitreybandhu’s 8 week “course” with weekly suggestions and practices.  The other authors I have found informative are Pema Chodron, John Kabat-Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, and (of course) the Dalai Lama.  Most of these people have guided meditation CDs that can help get a meditation practice going.

Even better yet, meditate with people who have some experience.  Join one of John Kabat-Zinn’s 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction courses, which he pioneered at the University of Massachusetts Medical School but are now available throughout the country.  Look for a Zen center or “Zen Sitting (meditating) Group” in the phone book or on the internet.  That’s how I found the Pittsburgh group, whom I’m meeting with the first time later this week.

Trust me, Zen Buddhists are the last people to shove theology down your throat—it’s totally compatible with other religious viewpoints.  One book I’d recommend for any Christian folks concerned about the “Buddhist” part of the meditation equation is Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh.

2) Keep your expectations modest. Easier said than done.  Though mindfulness practice can be life-changing, it may not be as dramatic as you’d hope or not in the ways you’d expect.  Pinning all your hopes to mindfulness as a life-changer can be counterproductive to the goals of mindfulness, which is just to experience what you’re experiencing in the moment without necessarily trying to change anything.  Sorry, people.  You’re not going to develop Jedi Powers and start levitating off the ground in the Lotus Position, or be able to bend a spoon with your mind.

On the flip side, there is some preliminary scientific evidence that meditation can improve concentration, mood, attention, decrease physical stress response, and may be beneficial for symptoms of anxiety and depression.  One recently published study, for example, showed that compared to a control group, people who meditated demonstrated increased grey-matter density in brain areas linked to memory and learning, and decreased density in areas linked with stress.

Despite promising research findings, beware the tendency to overstate what meditation can “do for you.”  If your expectations aren’t too high, then you can be more open-minded to the experience.

"Whoa. There IS no spoon."

3) Start small. Aim for meditating for a short time to start with, like 10 or 15 minutes (set an alarm so you aren’t watching the clock).  Most meditation practices require you to sit upright on a straight-backed chair or on the floor, and pay attention to your breathing.  Why breathing?  Because it’s our most obvious bodily rhythm, and it’s always there as long as we are, which makes it a good place to learn to focus our attention.

4) Realize that your mind will be constantly distracted, which makes it very hard at first.  It is for everyone.  Reading some blog comments, I heard lots of people say they are “bad at meditating” because they tried it a couple times and felt their mind was all over the place.  I think that’s true for everyone, which is why most beginning meditations have you concentrate on more than just breathing, such as counting each breath up to 8 or 10 and starting over each time your mind wanders.  Over time, our ability to pay attention to one thing (like our breathing) will improve.

Rachel Cosgrove says that people have 50,000 thoughts a day.  I don’t know if that’s a scientific fact, but it’s certainly a useful idea.  Trust me: you’re bound to have about 1,000 of them while you’re first meditating.  The key is not to get mad at yourself or your spastic, AD/HD brain, but just calmly and nonjudgmentally to notice and label this distracting thought, and redirect your attention back to your breath.  Over and over.

Case in point:  My meditation today was 15 minutes long, and I focused on paying attention to my breath while counting each one up to 8, and then counting backwards down to 1, over and over.  During my practice, I thought about whether I should leave my eyes fully open, or close them halfway like the Japanese Buddhists recommend.  I tried closing them halfway, and thought about how that felt weird and that I should just open them.  I thought about the blog post I would write later about this, and then remembered that I was supposed to be meditating. I wondered whether my cats would start meowing at my bedroom door, since I shut them out of the room to minimize distractions.  Those are only the thoughts I had during my first eight breaths.  Is this discouraging?  Not really for me, because I’ve had the experience of it getting much easier.

I’m certainly no expert (as shown by my long hiatus), but these are a few of my thoughts.

Readers, what are your experiences with meditation?  Have you ever tried it before, or are thinking about giving it a try?  Any “veterans” out there with opinions or advice?