Making Meditation Easy
My friend wants to start a meditation practice because she knows it would be good for her health, focus and mood, but she’s stuck. As far as she can make out, she told me, to meditate is to make your mind stop thinking. It sounds great, except that it’s impossible.
She’s right: we can’t make our minds stop. The mind will always win that battle. But meditation can be easy.
My favorite teacher, Adyashanti, tells the story of how he discovered meditation as a young boy. He had heard about it and explained to his friend that you sit still with your eyes closed and look inside. They sat in a field for about ten minutes and then opened their eyes and jumped up excitedly.
“Wow, wasn’t that cool?” they exclaimed.
That’s really all there is to it. A child can do it, and so can you. Instead of approaching it as a battle against your mind, approach it as a child approaches a playground. Your inner playground.
There’s so much there beyond the mind, though we often aren’t aware. I told my friend so.
“What else is there to focus on?” she asked dubiously. “Your body?”
Yes, focusing on the sensations in your body is a great way to meditate. Many people focus on the sensation of breathing, or they slowly scan their body, noticing how each part feels from the top of their heads to the tips of their toes.
As you focus on your bodily sensations, you may also perceive your emotions. After all, we feel our emotions in our bodies; that’s probably why they’re called “feelings.”
It can be revelatory to turn our attention from our thoughts to our feelings. It’s like listening to an orchestra, a complex and fascinating symphony that’s happening inside us all the time, constantly changing, so often ignored or repressed, but completely worth paying attention to.
Once you spend some time with your feelings and sensations, you’ll notice how you can dip in and out of your mind, in and out of thinking. You’ll experience yourself as larger than your mind.
You can feel yourself as the space within which your mind and emotions happen.
Discovering that we are not stuck in our thoughts is a bit like looking up from our cell phones. After being absorbed by the screen for a long time, we can wake up from that state to feel expansion and relief.
When we feel our more spacious, peaceful presence, time seems to slow down. Emotions flow through us more easily. We can sit back into our own being and feel more ourselves. It’s like coming home.
Photo by Felipe Balduino on Pexels
Do you feel like trying it?
I may be overly optimistic to hope that someone will develop a meditation practice based on a simple blog post like this. But in the Wise Humanity course, we have launched quite a few meditators into a lasting and fulfilling practice and with only the gentlest and simplest instructions.
You can decide to make meditation easy. Here are four tips for how:
Let up on your goals. Meditation is not a competitive sport, and you don’t have to meet any expectations. Ten minutes is fine. Two minutes. Even one minute. Do what feels good. Put your hands on your heart and a gentle smile on your lips, close your eyes and take one deep breath. That’s a great practice right there.
After your meditation, your mind may come online to judge the meditation as “good” or “bad.” Remind yourself that the good meditation is the one you showed up for. Give yourself a pat on the back for doing it and know that every meditation is a step towards greater wellbeing, whether you feel an immediate benefit or not.
A great way to keep meditation interesting and fun is to listen to a guided meditation. There are plenty of free ones on YouTube, and you can use apps such as Insight Timer, Calm, or Headspace.
Or simply sit and look inside, the way Adyashanti did, with a beginner’s openness. To this day, his instruction is: “No manipulation. Let everything be as it is.”
In other words, be easy on yourself, and meditation will become easy.
As you let go of the mind’s intensity and allow yourself ease, you can follow the path of the mystics to gain a new sense of your essential self and profound inner peace.
Explore. It’s your very own inner playground. Have an easy, fun time with meditation.
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p.s. Coincidentally, the same day that this blog was published, New York City announced that all children in the NYC public schools will learn mindful breathing!
