Why & How To Get Started With A Daily Meditation Practice
I’ve become one of those people that believe the world could become a much better place to live in—fairly quickly, too—if everybody (or at least a whole bunch more of us) had a daily meditation practice going.
And I know that sounds like an airy-fairy, way to simplistic thing to say on the surface, but the thing about having a daily meditation practice is it requires you, for a small chunk of every day, to remove your body/mind/soul from our usual constant waking state of always being distracted by external stimuli, and the accumulated effect of doing that on a daily basis is you start to permanently lift your head out of the fog of modern life, little by little, until eventually you can’t help but see how much of a clown show farce our so-called society is everywhere you look. And you’ll start seeing this reality show reality in a way that makes it very hard to just mindlessly go back to going along with what the powers that be keep telling you to just keep going along with, as so much of the corruption and hypocrisy is so painfully stupid & obvious & EVERYWHERE once you make mindfulness training a part of your every day. And we really need A LOT more of us walking around with these blinders off; we really need A LOT less of us being so willing to just keep going along with it all.
But if we don’t individually start taking time out of our busy days to practice tuning out all the outside noise and start listening to that intuitive voice inside ourselves—just a small chunk of every day (I do 20 minutes each morning) where we’re not listening to something or watching something or reading something or talking to someone or running around being busy chasing after something—we’re never going to collectively see the same forest from the trees, and they’re going to keep on grifting us until we’ve got nothing left to grift.
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A nice bonus to having a daily meditation practice is that there are a bunch more subtle and not so subtle personal benefits (ie. becoming more patient, becoming more compassionate, becoming better at concentrating, becoming better at dealing with your emotions, etc), all of which come in quite handy for the work needed to start building a better world, but the big capital Double-U ‘WHY’ for why you need to start your own practice right now is that the world needs a whole bunch more of us working on pulling our heads out of the sand RIGHT NOW more than ever before. Because, and I’m sure you’ve noticed, there is a lot of sh*t that is blatantly f*cked up right now, and if we don’t start waking ourselves up individually on a daily basis we’re never going to be able to get our collective eyes on the correct prize long enough to make any real & necessary changes. Because sh*t doesn’t need to be this f*cked up.
But we can’t wake up if we let ourselves stay in a constant state of distraction, which is why having a daily meditation practice is so important — it’s not the only thing we’re going to need to do in order to start righting the ship, but it’s that vital foundation piece that needs to be laid down on an individual basis before we can make any lasting progress together in anything else. Otherwise, any positive momentum is just gonna keep slipping through our fingers as we continue to get tricked into being distracted by one shiny thing after another.
But in order to get started, first we each gotta get started.
How to get started with a daily meditation practice
As for the all caps ‘HOW’ for getting a daily meditation practice started, well, I’m going to try and keep things focused on the early stages of getting the daily habit set and not so much on the technical aspects of ‘how to meditate’ — as there are a bunch of different ways that one can meditate and the reality is that once you get the habit set, your practice is going to evolve uniquely for yourself anyways, as meditation is not a ‘one size fits all’ kind of thing. Also, at the time of writing this blog post, I’ve only had a daily meditation practice going for 2.5+ years, so the thing I mostly only know what I’m talking about is how to go from a person who never meditated, to being a person who meditates for at least 20 minutes everyday.
The good news is that getting a meditation practice going is actually fairly easy, all you have to do is not overthink what you think you should be doing while you are sitting there. The best way to do that is set a timer for 20 minutes and then just sit there with your eyes closed until the timer goes off (and if you genuinely don’t have a 20 minute gap in your day to sit still doing nothing, you can do 5, 10 or 15 minutes — but just know that you’ll see accumulative progress faster if you sit for 20 minutes everyday opposed to 5, but also know that any amount of time sitting each day counts and is infinitely better than not sitting at all). That’s honestly all you have to do to get started. Set the timer, sit until the time goes off, repeat every day.
Of course, there is more to meditation than just sitting there with your eyes closed waiting for the timer to go off, but when you are first getting started, just the act of sitting there doing nothing is more than enough of a revolutionary act for our over-stimulated lifestyles that it’s more than ok if ‘just sitting' is all you do in the beginning.
In fact, I highly recommend that you don’t even try learning more about meditation until you’ve tackled the first hurdle most people trip up on: you have to learn to become ok with doing absolutely nothing for a small chunk of your day.
On top of that, spending some time experiencing just how non-stop your brain chatter is even when there are no other distractions going on is a pretty big eye opener to how important it is to try and learn how to train your mind better. So spend some time just sitting with your thoughts and pay attention to what your brain is like when you’re not constantly distracted by everything else. There be some personal learnings to be had, I promise.
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Once you get over the hump of being ok with spending a part of your day just doing nothing — which, again, meditation is never quite “doing nothing” because doing nothing is actually doing something that our consumer-minded capitalistic lives have been trained to never allow for, which is “something” — the next important realization with meditating is realizing that it’s not about achieving some blissed out zen state, especially in the beginning (and by beginning, I don’t mean the first few days, I’m talking the first few years – as in, I’ve been doing a daily practice for over 2.5 years and I still don’t have any transcendent blissed out zen moments). I hear so many people say that meditation wasn’t for them because they just couldn’t stop thinking about things they should be doing instead and couldn’t quiet their mind — and the shame with that is those people were so close to realizing what the early stages of meditation practice is really about: it’s about noticing that you can’t stop being distracted about other things; it’s about noticing how you can’t just be present in the moment.
The act of noticing is such a major part of what you are working on when you are sitting, but the key is to notice that you noticed and not beat yourself up about noticing because the act of noticing is actually the skill you’re trying to strengthen. So, good job noticing! And that’s where the “concentrate on your breath” bit that you’ve probably heard about meditation comes in — you notice that you noticed that you got distracted and then you return to your breath until you notice you got distracted again. Rinse & repeat.
Too many people think if they can’t stay completely concentrated on their breath, then that must mean they suck at meditation. But the correct way to think about things is that getting distracted from your breath is GUARANTEED to happen, and it’s GUARANTEED to happen often, in fact, it’s kinda the point — so the thing you are really doing is catching yourself once you realize you’ve been distracted, and then when you go back to concentrating on your breath that is like doing one bicep curl with your mind.
And when you work out your muscles, you tend to do more than one bicep curl right? Well, when meditating, you will be doing more than one ‘noticed you got distracted, returned to concentrating on the breath’ curl. And every time you do, you are working out your brain.
You are literally exercising your ability to recognize when you get pulled away by your thoughts and emotions, and just like the way that working out your body at the gym does not just benefit you while you are working out your body at the gym — for example, you notice the benefits of doing cardio training at the gym the next time you’re walking up stairs or playing tag with your little nieces or et cetera — working out your brain on the meditation seat also leads to noticeable benefits out in the real world. And it doesn’t take too long before you start noticing the results in your interactions with the outside world.
The first time I noticed how beneficial my daily meditation practice was becoming in my real world interactions happened in my first week of meditating and was a major factor in me having the motivation to stick with things long enough for the habit to become set in stone. I was at the grocery store and the clerk was giving attitude to the person in front of me and I noticed an attitude building within myself. But instead of letting my inner jerk take control unnoticed, as it would have in the past, I actually caught my inner self planning what would be the best way to give the clerk attitude back when it was my turn to be rung through and I was able to pump the brakes on myself and consciously choose a better way to act/react.
It was a real ‘aha moment’: sitting on the meditation seat and catching myself getting distracted by the thoughts & stories in my head was really just training for when I am out in the real world getting distracted by the thoughts & stories in my head. Which, it turns out, happens ALL THE TIME — but now I was actually training my ability to notice when it happens and choose a more skillful reaction. Huzzah!
And that’s when it really clicked how important my daily meditation practice was. Because, if you think it’s hard not getting distracted when you’re sitting in your meditation seat with your eyes closed and hardly any other outside distractions are going on, just imagine how hard it is to not get railroaded by the storylines in your head when you’re in a busy supermarket, or in a meeting at work, or talking with a loved one, or et cetera. Being a better, more mindful person starts on the inside and it takes a lot of internal practice & training, on the daily.
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And that leads us to the other big realization that’ll help you stay focused on keeping a daily meditation practice going once you get started: your entire experience of life happens within yourself, so it would be foolish to not spend some time each day working on & working out the part of your being that processes all that experiencing.
Now, I’m not saying that everything that happens outside of yourself is not real and this all a simulation (I’m also not not saying that), but an easy way to imagine just how much of the outside world really only exists for you as how it gets interpreted inside yourself, the next time you are in a crowded place, take a moment to imagine how much different your experience of that situation would be if all of the sudden you lost your sense of hearing… and then you lost your sense of sight.
If you want to get the full experience of realizing we’re all just consciousness floating around in space, now imagine you lost your sense of taste, smell and touch as well. Nothing will have changed for everyone else around you, and you would still exist as conscious awareness, but your entire experience of that crowded place would be completely different — because everything outside of yourself only exists for you because your sense receptors process the information inside of you.
Long story short, EVERYTHING you experience happens from within yourself. Once you realize that reality, it really starts to seem pretty logical to want to get a better understanding of what’s going on inside yourself and how to be in better control of how you act and react to the nonstop sensory overload you experience throughout the day —and having a daily meditation practice is still the best and most time proven technique for working on that skillset.
So, whenever you find yourself trying to tell yourself that meditating is a stupid waste of time, because your ego will definitely try to get you to quit and get back to the act of constantly chasing after things to distract yourself with and build-up your ego’s sense of importance, remember to remind yourself that not having a meditation practice is a lot like not referring to the instruction manual when you’re putting together Ikea furniture — sure you might be able to kinda look like you know what you’re doing for awhile, but eventually you’re going to want to smash that Docksta Poäng Thinga-majig and throw it into the Nordic sea. And that’s just not very functional.
I’m not saying that reading the instructional manual will make things completely frustration free, but you’ll be more in control of what you’re doing and you’ll be able to put things together much more skillfully. And that’s what meditation is all about — it won’t remove all the frustrations of life, but it’ll help you navigate your day more skillfully. And going about your life more skillfully is how you achieve real happiness (not that temporary happiness you get when you buy a new toy or eat a bag of tasty, tasty potato chips).
Of course, there is a lot more to meditation than what I’ve described above, but the WHYs & HOWs described above are the key points for getting a daily habit started — those things again: set a timer for 20 minutes EVERY DAY and sit there until the timer goes off, realize that noticing you get distracted is what you are actually working on & is a part of ‘waking up’, know that the real benefits of sitting everyday will be experienced out in the real world & not just by you, and remember that your entire experience of life happens inside yourself so it’d be stupid to not be working on your inside game— and getting a daily meditation practice started is hands down the most important part of the process, especially in the beginning (otherwise there would be no beginning — which might just be the end for us all).
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