Start meditating today
Practising mindfulness isn’t complicated, but it’s also not easy
Near the beginning of the pandemic, when we were all freaked out about surfaces, I started using my elbow to push the lift buttons in my apartment building. It’s more sanitary but less effective. In hitting eight (my floor), I’d often clumsily mash five (not my floor). In the 12 or so seconds it takes the lift to ascend five stories, I’d frequently end up so lost in either my thoughts or my phone that I’d get off on the wrong floor. You might say I’m not mindful. It’s particularly embarrassing, then, to admit I’ve had a meditation practice for years – ever since I walked into a bookshop and, out of sheer curiosity, picked up The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh. (Mindfulness is a present, ongoing awareness of what’s happening. Meditation is the formal practice of mindfulness.) As well as giving basic instructions on how to meditate, it lays out a way of relating to thoughts, emotions and feelings that’s downright liberating to someone neurotic enough to push a lift button with his elbow. According to Hanh, through the simple act of paying attention to my breath – and thus “keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality” – I could quiet my anxieties, lighten up, and “find joy and peace in this very moment”. That’d be a miracle indeed.
I started meditating that day. Three years later – with, admittedly, a few dry spells – the changes have been profound.
I’d list them all, but I’d probably be repeating something you already know and might be tired of hearing. Mindfulness and meditation have been linked to everything from making you kinder and less stressed to helping with your irritable bowel syndrome. And yet the way mindfulness is often sold in our goal-oriented, productivity obsessed, endlessly self optimising culture can make the act of beginning or maintaining a practice difficult. If it’s packaged as a quick-fix panacea to relieve you of all suffering and stress, you might rightfully be disappointed when, after a few deep breaths, you’re still anxious, don’t feel “fixed”, and can’t get off the lift on the right floor.
That packaging is, unfortunately, how many people get introduced to meditation
– or, frankly, any new habit during this relentlessly self-bettering time of year. But I’ve found that there’s another, less high-stakes way of approaching meditation. The Buddhist nun Pema Chodron puts it best, in her book When Things Fall Apart: “In practising meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal – quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is... Awakeness is found in our pain, confusion and wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.”
This thought has proved to be a buoy anytime I’ve found myself drowning in self-doubt, frustrated with my progress. That we’ve got room for improvement isn’t a sign we need more practice. That is the practice. Starting there – as opposed to a place of shame, where many resolutions start – might prove more sustainable if you’re interested in beginning or revisiting a mindfulness practice.
So here are some thoughts on getting into meditation – how to do it, what it looks like, and what to expect – with some help from books I’ve read along the way, and the guidance of three meditation teachers: Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, who, in 1975, founded the Insight Meditation Society; and Tara Brach, who’s also a psychotherapist.
What’s mindfulness?
It’s a term so overused that it’s meaningless. It’s often confused with presence. To explain why that’s a mistake, Goldstein brings to mind the image of a playful black lab. We’d say the dog is present, but we wouldn’t describe it as mindful. It has no awareness of being in the present. Thus being mindful suggests a level of metacognition. Or, ‘knowing that we’re knowing’, as he puts it.
But simple recognition isn’t quite mindfulness either. Take the example of loud noise. We might recognise it – we know that we hear it – but if that recognition is coloured by a desire for it to stop, then there needs to be recognition of that desire for it to go away, too. We’re aware of what’s happening around us, and our attachment (or aversion) to those conditions.
‘Mindfulness would mean being in the present, observing what’s happening in a nonjudgmental way, free of greed, aversion and delusion,’ says Goldstein.
To illustrate the importance of this type of clear-seeing, I’ll borrow a metaphor often used in mindfulness teaching: think of standing underneath a waterfall. Though it can often be a pleasant experience, especially on a hot day, it’s also loud, noisy, and nearly impossible to sense anything happening outside the torrent of water rushing down over you. Seeing your thoughts, feelings, and emotions as they are – and everything you attach to them – is like taking a small step back out from under the onslaught of the waterfall. »
They don’t go away, but now you can see them more clearly.
By seeing them clearly, you have more agency and can respond more constructively. Say someone at work is pissing you off. If you’ve ever had a meltdown you later regretted, then you know often getting mad is one of the least effective ways of dealing with anger. By attending to the anger mindfully – seeing both anger and your aversion to it – you can then decide the best course of action, instead of flying into a rage.
Goldstein compares it to having a remote for the television of our minds. ‘Mostly, we’re watching the channels habitually. But through mindfulness, we can pay attention. We can really see: does this contribute to my happiness, [or] another’s happiness? Well, no. It’ll just create more suffering for myself or others. When you’re mindful enough to see that, then click the remote. Most people aren’t aware that they hold the remote in their hands.’
Brach says that when a meditation practice resonates with her clients and students, it’s because there’s ‘space that opens up’ between the things they feel and think and the ways they react. In that space, they have more choice. ‘There’s an incessant inner dialogue that goes on, but you don’t have to believe the story,’ she says. ‘The people
I see that start a practice and have the most benefit, they’re getting that as a takeaway: I’m not my thoughts. I don’t have to believe my thoughts. And that’s the beginning of freedom.’
This isn’t just metaphorical freedom. You’re actually interrupting the neural circuitry that’s been hard-wired to keep you alive by constantly scanning for threats.
‘Every time you have an anxious thought, it sends a message to your body to tighten that up – if you can see those thoughts and instead of fuelling them, take a few breaths and reconnect with what’s right here, you’re interrupting the entire habit of anxiety,’ she says. ‘You have the option when you interrupt it to create new neural pathways. Neural pathways that are more creative, intelligent and open-hearted.’
How do I start?
As mentioned, the practice of mindfulness is meditation. There are many different types of formal meditation, some of which look the way you’d imagine – sitting, relaxed but alert, focussing on the breath. But it doesn’t always have to be formal. As Brach puts it, ‘There’s a lot of language for meditation, but meditation is training your attention in a way that benefits your wellbeing.’ For Brach, sometimes that means having her patients note and name their thoughts or emotions.
‘If you get anxious a lot and every time you’re anxious, you pause and name it – say ‘anxiety, anxiety’ – and name it a few more times, in a voice that’s friendly enough, that starts ratcheting down the level of anxiety. There’s research that shows that when you note an emotion, mentally name it, it calms down the limbic system.’
Salzberg says you can think of meditation as being divided into two categories. There’s the period of sustained awareness where you’re sitting, but then there are other more informal pockets of mindfulness you can steal throughout your day. She uses an example from Hanh, who says that instead of picking up the phone on the first ring, you should let it ring three times and use that as a reminder to breathe. One of Salzberg’s teachers calls this ‘short moments, many times’.
‘[These are] short moments in your life where you get to rest, or you get some space, or you get to come back to yourself,’ she says. ‘Nothing long, so it’s not going to upend your to-do list. But even drinking a cup of tea or coffee without multitasking. Those are significant parts of the practice, which many people overlook.’
As for that more formal type of meditation, there are a wide variety of ways to practise. Some involve sitting or lying down, others walking. I sit cross-legged on the ground, in a posture that’s comfortable but keeps me alert (since I’m usually doing this first thing in the morning) and choose an object of awareness. For me, that’s the breath. But it could be a mantra, a set of phrases, or a sound. I close my eyes, but you can keep yours open – the point is to figure out what works for you. I then take full inhalations and exhalations through my nose, and pay attention to my breath as it comes in and as it goes out.
I focus on it, rising and falling in my chest, but it might be how it feels on your nose or in your stomach. Salzberg calls this ‘resting our attention on the object’. That’s the practice.
You don’t want to overthink it – but that’s the hard part. As Goldstein writes in his book Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, “It’s very simple, although perhaps not so easy.” If you’re anything like me, you’ll
‘Seeing your thoughts, feelings and emotions as they are is like taking a small step back out from under the onslaught of the waterfall’
find that almost immediately after you sit, you’ll get distracted: you’ll start racing through your to-do list, or your back will hurt, or you’ll wonder why you said that dumb thing in yesterday’s company-wide Zoom.
Note that your mind has been carried away and gently come back to the breath. If it helps, you can imagine your thoughts as clouds in a sky, cars on the road, or waves in the ocean. You note their passing, but you don’t get carried away. Moments later, you’ll find that, again, you’ve wandered. You realise, quickly, that what seems extremely easy – sitting, quieting your mind – is, in fact, extraordinarily difficult. That is where frustration can set in.
‘There comes a moment when we realise, Oh, it’s been quite some time since I last felt a breath,’ says Salzberg, who’s been meditating for half a century. ‘What’s tempting as part
of our conditioning is, at that moment, to get lost in a whole spate of self-judgement: I can’t believe I’m thinking. No one else thinks when they meditate. I’m the only one who thinks. Maybe other people do think, but they’re thinking
beautiful, wonderful thoughts. We get completely overwhelmed.’
Brach says that ‘if somebody else were whispering into my ear all the nonsense that my brain comes up with, I wouldn’t put up with it for a minute.’ Goldstein, too, says that it’s crucial to realise this is a common experience of every meditator.
‘It doesn’t mean that the practice isn’t working or that we can’t do it, it’s just a manifestation of a mind that hasn’t trained in it,’ he says. ‘That’s how it is in learning anything new.’
Why am I doing this again?
Consider how many times throughout your day things don’t go according to plan. You sit down to chug through some work, and all of a sudden, your kid starts screaming or your boss sends you something urgent to address. You set out for a run, and your calves decide not to work. You go to make eggs, and you drop the entire box on the ground. It happens on a macro scale, too: consider what you expected 2020 to be like this time last year.
Meditation can be a training ground for exactly this type of upheaval. You try to rest your attention on your immediate experience, and, all of a sudden, you’re thinking about dinner. You try, and you fail. Life goes like this, too – over and over again, until your time runs out. How fluid and graceful you can be with that turbulence might determine the quality of your life.
That’s why the pervasive idea that you’re doing meditation “wrong” if you’re “thinking too much” is particularly harmful. ‘I’ve seen so many people through the years feel they’ve failed [at meditation] because they’re still thinking, or they have tons of thoughts or painful feelings,’ says Salzberg. ‘We don’t believe you can fail because the point isn’t to get rid of that stuff, but to develop a different relationship to it.’
Salzberg says that this is why she sometimes refers to this style of meditation – where you have an object of awareness and are deepening concentration
– as resilience training. You’re cultivating an ability to bounce back. This type of resiliency doesn’t have to be born out of critical or harsh self-judgment, but a way to practice ‘letting go gently,’ she says. You see that you’ve wandered and you come back to start again. (In her book, Chodron uses the helpful image of tenderly touching a bubble with a feather.)
Goldstein says that when something difficult happens – maybe it’s anxiety or pain – and you find yourself fighting it, it might be helpful to imagine what you’d say to a young child going through that experience: ‘With the child, we probably wouldn’t be judging it. We wouldn’t be saying,
“Oh, that’s terrible. You shouldn’t be feeling it. Stop complaining.”’
How often should I do it?
Though you need to make a commitment you can stick to, it’s important to remember that you’re trying to build a habit, which means no days off.
‘There’s so much research saying even a short amount each day calms the limbic system and activates the parts of the brain that help you be more present, open-hearted, and give you more perspective, executive function,’ says Brach. ‘To integrate that, have that available, and have it go from a state to trait, takes time.’
When she was younger, Brach lived in an ashram for ten years, where she’d practice meditation for hours a day. But when she left the ashram – some thirty years ago, with a four-month-old infant – she committed to meditating every day.
‘I’ve done it every day, no matter what,’ she says. ‘But there’s a backdoor to it. And the backdoor is that it doesn’t matter how long. Focus on the “every day, no matter what” part. You can do it standing, sitting, or even walking. It has to be, “I dedicate this window of time to being present.”’