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Meditation: A Short Tutorial

Meditation is exercise for the mind. In my experience, practicing meditation for several months has the following effects:

• Much improved ability to concentrate
• The mind feels ‘lucid’ and calm rather than ‘murky’ and agitated
• Improved memory (things become easier to recall)
• Improved creativity
• A general feeling of being one step ahead of things (chores and such) instead of one step behind

Meditation is tightly linked with several far-eastern religions and philosophies such as Buddhism. As can be expected, these belief systems attribute many mystical properties to meditation. Nonetheless, meditation can be successfully detached from these beliefs and used as a tool to sharpen the mind. It is just an example of a practical discovery made by religiously-minded people, and I will stick to its practical aspects.

There are many forms of meditation. The most commonly practiced form, which is the one I practice, involves concentrating on one’s breathing. It is called Anapanasati. The technique is very simple: Sit on a chair, feet straight on the floor, back straight, hands resting on lap. Set a timer to ring in say fifteen minutes. Close your eyes and mouth, and breath normally through your nose. Concentrate on the air coming in and out of your nostrils, counting each breath as you exhale. Count the breaths silently: One, two, three, four; one, two, three, four; and so on. Continue until the timer goes off.

Meditating is difficult because as you try to concentrate on your breaths, your mind wanders and you start thinking about other things. When this happens, you should gently yet firmly divert your attention back to the breathing, back to the air flowing in and out of your nostrils. At first this will happen a lot. After several meditations the intruding thoughts will appear less often, and there will be stretches of pure concentration without disturbances.

After some practice, you will come to a stage where a thought occasionally creeps into your consciousness, you note it and let it fade back to where it came from. If you think of your mind as a bucket filled with water and sand, the everyday mind is constantly stirred so the sand muddies the water. Meditation pauses the stirring, letting the sand sink down, making the water lucid.

Once your mind is calm enough so that you can count your breaths for fifteen or twenty minutes without losing count, you can go on to the next level and concentrate more deeply on your breathing and on other areas of your body. For example, you can gradually let your awareness cover greater areas surrounding your nose: First your nose and your mouth, then your whole face, then on to your entire body. You should do this slowly, all the while keeping your concentration and not letting your mind wander. When you reach this level you should seek further instruction, for instance by reading a book or taking a course on the subject.

Some general guidelines:

• If at any point you feel meditation is somehow bad or wrong for you — stop doing it. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea.
• Try not to move while meditating. Don’t open your eyes or mouth. After several minutes your hands or legs may feel numb — this is normal. On the other hand, if you feel pain you should stop and change your position.
• Meditation should be practiced at least once a day, otherwise it is not effective. At first, sit down for ten minutes at a time. When this becomes easy, go up to fifteen minutes. Then to twenty or more.
• Do not meditate when you are tired, for example before going to sleep. You will quickly lose concentration and fall asleep. By the way, if you are having trouble sleeping, meditation can sometimes solve the problem.

Here are some tips I picked up along the way:

• When the mind wanders, you may feel bad about failing to keep your concentration. The fact is that you should actually feel pleased, because diverting your thought back to the breathing is exactly what improves your concentration in your everyday life. It took me a long time to appreciate this.
• Itches make for excellent practice. An itch is something concrete that tries to grab your attention. Try to resist for as long as you can and keep thinking about your breathing. Often, the itching sensation goes away after a while.
• Pain makes for terrible practice. As explained above, if you feel pain you should act to stop it.
• In time, this form of meditation may become boring, and you may be tempted to switch to another form or try variations of breath-counting. There’s no problem with trying out other forms in addition to the one you’re practicing, but it’s a huge mistake to just switch because of boredom. For a beginner, the value of meditation lies in the fact that it is hard and boring. Concentrating on something boring is exactly how you improve your concentration. So shuffling things around when you’re bored defeats the whole purpose of what you’re doing.

If you want to read further, there’s a wealth of information available on the web and in books. Amazon doesn’t carry the books I learned from, but it looks like there are many other good ones.