Everyday Is A Good Day To Start Meditating
We are all running different versions of the same autopilot software in our body/minds, and it is one that is easily hacked by society to not always have our best interests in mind. If you don't already know this to be true, just take a quick look around at the world and see if you can notice how few people are making the best use of their one shot at fully experiencing/appreciating the temporary miracle that is being a live human being for a brief moment of time.
If you're feeling really brave, take a look at your own life.
That is kinda what meditation is: stopping to take a look at your self and maybe connecting with that mysterious life source inside (whatever you want to call it, you know what I’m talking about). Which makes meditation both really easy to do (duh… anyone can sit with their eyes closed) and also really hard (woah… this sounds like it might have the potential to get heavy). But if you can just overpower your skeptical ego long enough to get a daily meditation habit set, you'll slowly start noticing that you’re pulling your head out of the fog more often throughout the day, even if only for a few moments every now & again. And all those little moments spent outside the fog start having accumulative effects (related: go read this long-but-excellent ‘Wait But Why’ article for an enlightening breakdown of "our lives in the fog").
But in order to get to that point, you have to start sitting down with yourself.
In a way, meditating is kinda like micro-dosing the red pill everyday (ie. it’ll help you be a bit more aware of your surroundings/interactions + the reality of the inner dialogue that runs through your head non-stop & how to deal with it better)—so just think of sitting down to meditate every morning as how you take your most important daily vitamin for being a pinch more woke.
Now, if your initial reaction is to think of excuses as to why you can't commit to sitting quietly with yourself for a few minutes everyday, take that as a warning for how bad you need to start a daily meditation practice. The fact that you would immediately try to talk yourself out of trying to better understand how YOU work probably suggests that your true self is not the one behind the wheel; you're probably not even the one choosing the radio station.
And you don’t want to be the backseat co-pilot in the meat & bone vehicle you've been assigned to navigate through your limited amount of trips around the sun with. I mean, the rental is in your name, you're responsible for any damages that come about when shit crashes, and shit will most definitely crash. Multiple times. Over and over, especially if you’re distracted in the backseat. So take the wheel back from Yeezus and start yourself a daily meditation practice.
OK But how does one get started With this meditation business?
There is a never ending pile of books and videos on meditating, so it's really easy to think that you have to "learn" how to meditate "correctly" before you can even dare to begin. But this is an easy trap to fall into and a great way to postpone the important work of just starting. Don't fall for it. Sure, it's true that there is a wide range of interesting things to learn about meditating and the rabbit holes run very deep, but just getting started is always be the best way to begin anything.
Luckily, meditation couldn't be simpler to start. You literally just sit there and be still. Every time you get distracted by your thoughts (which will happen over and over and over again, but that's ok because noticing that is kinda the point in the beginning) you recognize it happening and then you go back to concentrating on your breath (or whatever you are using as your anchor).
Some days will feel more "meditate-y" than others, but the important thing is setting the habit of sitting silently with yourself everyday and just breaking the habit of always needing to be doing something for every single waking moment. Also, most of the meditation learnings and realizations awaiting you are going to happen in your head while you're meditating, not in a book while you're reading about meditating (although, after you start meditating, the meditation books & guided meditations start making a lot more sense and becoming a lot more ‘aha’ filled – but it’s only after you start experiencing things for yourself in your own practice).
But don't take my ‘only-been-meditating-6-months-at-the-time-of-writing-this-essay’ word for it (note: this post was first written in April 2018), here is a video that condenses the basics down to 2 minutes of cute animation and acute narration:
The only thing I would add to this video is that you should set a timer. Otherwise, you'll constantly be thinking about whether it's been enough time yet. Trust me, once you start meditating you'll realize how many random distractions your brain will keep throwing at you & you don’t need to help it out by keeping the “has it been 20 minutes yet?” door open.
The fewer Topics Of Distraction your mind has in front of it the better (ie. I also meditate early in the morning when my apartment is at its quietest and I found wearing an eye mask was helpful in the beginning from keeping myself from thinking dumb stuff about whether I'm closing my eyes too tight or not tight enough — although I’ve since moved on to just closing my eyes without a mask), as this will give you a slight upper hand in the peaceful Jedi mind battles you'll be engaging with yourself on the daily.
TBH, I discovered that charming 'Meditation 101' video above a couple months into already starting my own daily practice, so those weren't the simple set of instructions that actually pushed me from procrastinating to practicing. Instead, the video that turned the light bulb in my head was actually a lot more long-winded & more intensely delivered—but this “how To Meditate’ video still has some good points to make, so if you still don't feel ready to make the jump into starting a daily meditation practice yet, maybe watch this video too:
I think the main thing that resonated with me in the Actualized.Org video was hearing that you can just sit in a chair to meditate (as the rigid westerner in me had insecurities about being spotted sitting in the traditional "lotus position" and whether I could even pull it off for more than 5 minutes). Plus, I found the idea of setting a timer—as simple and obvious as it now seems—to be an extremely helpful technique for getting me to do a specific time every day. This video also really hammered home the importance of doing it every day, no excuses, and it really feels like that is a key part.
As I mentioned earlier, there is WAY more on the topic of meditation than I have shared in this post. Depending on what speaks to your interests, there will be certain paths you'll want to go down further and different meditation techniques that will feel more right for you… but the most important thing is that you just set that basic starting foundation first. Every thing you read/listen/watch about meditation will make so much more sense once you actually have a daily practice going and you can actually relate to the information being passed on to you. Otherwise, it's a bit like reading everything there is to know about how to shoot a basketball without ever going and just actually shooting an actual basketball around.
So just start with the basics of sitting quietly with yourself every day — set your timer, close your eyes and do a little workout on that out of control distraction machine that is your mind and try to make that daily connection to the little light inside of you. When the timer goes off, you're done for the day. Do the same thing again tomorrow and the next day. And remember that the main goal here is not to get really good at sitting mindfully for a few minutes each day, it’s about training yourself to be more present throughout the rest of the day.
Some days will feel like you meditated better than the other days and vice versa. Just keep doing it. There will be plenty of time to kill Buddha on the path later. Besides, a lot of the benefits of meditation happen outside of your session. Which you will start noticing, if you keep the daily practice going long enough to start experiencing the positive results of being slightly more mindful / aware / compassionate (to yourself and to others).
I'll just add that if you want a good accompanying audiobook for those trying days of getting started and sticking to it, the voice from that 'Meditation 101' video embeded up above belongs to Dan Harris, and he recently put out 'Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics' audiobook and—despite the sometimes goofy dad humour and personal asides—it was the best "getting started with meditation" book that I came across during my recent getting started with meditation journey (Sharon Salzberg's 'Real Happiness' is also a very good starting point, especially if you’re already a bit more open to “spirituality”).
If you're skeptical on how an ABC news anchor might help you get started on the path to self-improvement, here's an example of how simple and practical Dan Harris can deliver the heady topic of better understanding how to work/live with your head:
Besides 'Meditation For Fidgety Skeptics' being really good at relating a lot of the same thoughts and doubts that will be going through your head while trying to get into meditation, the audiobook also features this very zen Canadian named Jeff Warren who jumps in to talk about meditating in a very easy going and way-less-manic-than-Dan way, and he also does some nice guided meditations.
So if you feel like you might need some training wheels to help get the daily habit rolling, you could do a lot worse than listening to Dan and Jeff. But you could possibly do better too (or better suited to you), so I recommend trying out an unlimited listening Audiobook service like Scribd as that way you can sample a bunch of different books and if something doesn't gel with you, ditch it and try another. Also, having access to a whole mess of books really comes in handy when you start wanting to dive deeper. Or at least it has been super helpful on my path to trying to be better at being a human being.
And that's really more than all you need to get started. Because, again, a bit part of it is just sitting there and doing nothing (which is actually one of the methods Jeff Warren shares).
Or, at least, if I could re-do my getting started so it just included the bare essentials of what worked best for me, I would narrow it down to the above recommendations. Hope they work for you.
Of course there are also apps like Headspace & Calm or you can find a meditation class in your town or go off on a retreat or whatever else might work best for you. The above suggestions are just what worked for me.
The main point is: you should start meditating every day.
It will profoundly change your life, very subtly.
I promise (no refunds).
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PS - Feel free to drop off any of your own meditation tips / questions in the comments below or come chat at me on the socials about your meditation experience — I'm a beginner myself, so I'm very much up for learning more / talking incessantly about how subtly great it is.
