For many years I tried to meditate, and failed miserably.

Finally I found a process that works.

First, don’t get uptight about meditating “wrong”: you’re not a Tibetan monk (probably), and it’s not realistic or even helpful to think about doing it “right”. In fact, that’s precisely the wrong attitude.

So relax and let it happen.

First is to settle into a comfortable place – the exact position doesn’t matter, but normally I sit in the classic cross-legged pose, with my hands either palms up or palms down. I’ve read that the position of the palms is significant, where palms up means to be more outward and open, and palms down is more self-focused and insulated.

My process is 5 steps.

  1. Get into touch, literally and figuratively, with your area. Try to engage each sense, such as smelling the air, determining what you can taste in your mouth, the sounds around you, the sensation of clothing (assuming you’re wearing some), and even what you can “see” with your eyes closed, such the lights through the eyelids.

    This step is to get one into the physical realm, which some consider to be the outermost of the body.

  2. Focus on your breathing. You can segue into this from step 1 by going through each of the types of sensations with regard to breathing, such as how the breath “feels” across the lips, what it tastes and smells like (when breathing into the nose), and so forth.

    The point here is to redirect your focus from the extraneous world and into the immediate surroundings in step 1, then to further narrow your focus to your breath, nose, and mouth.

  3. This is the most non-traditional step I’ve seen in meditation, and it’s why this practice works for me: let your thoughts drift in and out.

    Typically, or at least the stereotype, of meditation is to “block out all thoughts”. Hogwash I say. At least for me, my mind is racing constantly, and only when I’m very deep in focus – such as programming – do I not feel frenetic.

    I needed to deal with the fact that I have thoughts barraging me nonstop, and for me to try to “block out” them only made meditation frustrating and pointless for me.

    So the technique that I read about and developed is how to manage those thoughts. I envision myself on a busy city street, where I map the thoughts firing through my mind to people on the street, passing me by. I recognize the thought, as I might make eye contact with another person, but I don’t stop and engage the thought. I merely let it go by me, and use the experience to further analyze myself in terms of stickiness versus slipperiness: why do some thoughts/people “stick”, and are more difficult to disgage, and other ones are slippery, just going on past me effortlessly.

    I think that’s a valuable psychological technique, and I find it insightful to do a bit of self-analysis during that phase of my meditation: why am I letting thoughts “stick” to me, and not other ones? Assuming that it’s a choice, why am I choosing that?

  4. Focus on decisions, both recent (in the past day or so), and, segueing from step 3, the decisions as to which thoughts are engaged, and which are ignored.

    This step is not to be judgemental, or negative at all. It’s just to focus on decisions, and to go further into the mind. I just let a decision flicker into my head for a second and quickly note the existance of it, what it means, and what my decision says about me. Again, not judgemental, but more observational, with an element of compassion, the background idea being that it was likely the most reasonable decision that I could have made at the time.

    I look for commonalities in the decisions that are present in my mind, and what those are telling me I may want to focus on. That could be compassion with regards to others, decisiveness, physical discipline, self-responsibility …

  5. At this point I’m pretty deep in my own mind, and I try to locate my core: some call it Qi, or gut, or soul, but I just look for what I feel like is my core, which I can breathe into and feel expanding and developing.

    From step 4 I take the idea of what I want to focus on, and as I breathe into my core, I imagine that trait developing in sync as well. As I do this, I’m also monitoring my breathing – sometimes it can be difficult not to hold the breath – and when I get stray thoughts going through my head, I go back to the city street exercise.

    This is a fine line, but I’ll also think back to some decisions of step 4, and do a short what-if scenario: how would this decision be different if I had a little more compassion? Less ego?

    This process can get intense, especially step 5, and I recommend not overdoing it. When I feel like I’ve had enough, which might be a minute, or maybe a few minutes, I go back up through the steps.

    I’ll go back to step 4, letting decisions pop into my head and continuing to do the what-if scenarios with them. Then I’ll go though step 3, again letting random thoughts flow into me, and noticing the difference from before in terms of which ones I let “stick” and which I don’t.

    Then I go back to breathing, noticing how my breathing is different than at the start. Maybe it’s more relaxed, maybe it’s more focused, maybe it’s deeper, maybe it’s calmer. I do that be focusing on the physical senses, which then takes me into step 1, where again I take note of the difference – am I hearing noises in a way that I wasn’t before? Does the air still smell the same?

    This form of meditation is intense, and sometimes I’ve been able to do it for only a couple of minutes. I don’t advise trying to “burn out” on it, although if you’re going through an especially difficult period, I recommend spending more time on it, especially steps 4 and 5, to make some psychological breakthroughs.

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity. – Voltaire

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