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Many questions come up in relation to meditation, and here are some answers. There are no absolute rules and these suggestions may not work for you, but they come from experienced meditators and meditation teachers.
Over the centuries people have learned meditation from a person, often someone who would become their personal guide or mentor. More recently, people have learned from books, and now we have apps – Calm and Headspace, for example, have tens of millions of users.
It’s great that meditation is becoming accessible in this way and, in a busy life, following a short, guided practice clearly works for many people. In the longer term though, for meditation to be really effective you will probably need to move on from what an app can offer. As meditation becomes your practice, most people eventually want to dispense with guidance and guide themselves. You will also probably have questions about the practice or your experience that really need a conversation with someone who’s more experienced than you.
Other people are important: at the beginning, they can keep you going; later on you may feel the importance of sharing meditation within a supportive community.
Everyone thinks! Minds seem to be made to be active, and stimulation sets them moving, like throwing a ball. So if you have lots of thoughts in meditation, you are not alone. Don’t despair, the busy-ness of our minds is exactly why we need to meditate. Our minds do eventually settle down and the ball will eventually stop rolling.
There are a few things to bear in mind. Firstly, we live in a culture that’s filled with stimulation: the phone is there to look at in even the smallest gaps in our time, and that kind of stimulation can be addictive. To be ready to settle into meditation more easily, we probably need to reduce the input we receive at other times and cherish the quiet moments.
It also helps to create conditions that support meditation, like dedicating a particular space, moving the body mindfully before we sit down and checking in with the body and our thoughts and feelings at the start of a practice, rather than just plunging in and hoping for the best.
We should be willing to make some effort to help the mind settle. A forceful, willed effort will probably be counterproductive, but we do need to keep patiently and persistently engaging with the practice. The counting element of the Mindfulness of Breathing can help.
Finally, there’s the internal stimulation of thoughts that have a strong emotional charge. Anxious thoughts, for example, create further thoughts because they grow from anxious feelings. So, we’ll probably need to do more than keep returning our attention to the breath. We’ll need to give some attention to our feelings in a way that helps bring them into awareness. That’s an important element in the art of meditation.
Many people find that the best time to meditate is first thing in the morning, before they’ve got caught up in the busy-ness of the day. The mind tends to be clearer and, if you get up early, you can carve out the time.
That doesn’t suit everyone. Some people take longer than others to wake up, some have children to feed and dress, and some need to leave early to go to work. So the evening is another possibility: sunset is traditionally a time for meditation in some Buddhist cultures. The main thing is to find a time when you can meditate regularly and make it part of your routine.
Meditation is a natural human capacity: think of our ancestors gazing up at the stars and feeling wonder, awe and deep peace. The practices are simply a way to access the mind’s capacity to settle and become more calm, and that’s available to us whether or not we are religious.
Having said that, meditation has been practised over the centuries in religious settings, and Buddhism made meditation central to its whole approach and view of life. So, if we are serious about meditation, it’s natural to learn from the great meditation masters and traditions.
In Buddhism, meditation is a part of a path, which means that it goes along with other practices and aspects of the path. These start with ethics and giving, which bring a different kind of awareness to the things that happen in our lives as a whole. The Buddhist path leads to Enlightenment or Awakening, and this colours how meditation is understood, right from the start. The steps we take early in our practice to settle the mind are an introduction to the vast capacity of the mind, as Buddhism conceives it, and loving kindness meditation introduces us to an entirely different, selfless mode of being.
Because of this perspective, in a Buddhist context meditation goes along with faith, ritual, imagination and all the qualities we see embodied in an image of the Buddha.
Everyone’s different. If you’re reasonably flexible, it’s great to sit on the floor, either cross-legged or kneeling – though you might need some guidance on finding the right posture for you, and work out the right kind of cushions and supports. If that doesn’t work for you, don’t worry. You can meditate perfectly well in a chair, with your feet supported firmly and, if possible, not resting back fully into it.
If you’re getting started, it’s probably best to meditate for a short period, maybe just five or ten minutes to start with. If you persist, you’ll soon want to extend the time because in a few minutes the mind and body are only starting to settle down. That’s bound to take a while, so ten minutes is really a minimum time to meditate within a regular practice, and there’s research showing that meditating for ten minutes a day brings measurable benefits. However, you do need to do it regularly, and the research shows that little and often is better than longer but more occasional periods.
In Triratna, we recommend that you meditate for 20-30 minutes a day as you get going with it. This will help you establish a solid practicing both the Mindfulness of Breathing and Metta Bhavana.
Meditators in most traditions close their eyes because this reduces the visual input that can be so distracting and helps us settle inwards. However, there are exceptions. Zen Buddhists sit with their eyes open, facing a wall, and some Tibetan Buddhists keep their eyes half-open because they think that closing them conduces to falling asleep. Others, who are prone to anxiety, keep their eyes open because closing them brings a sense of not being safe. Most meditation teachers will recommend that you close your eyes unless you have a reason not to. The important thing is that you find what’s right for you.
Many people experiencing stress and anxiety use meditation to help them unwind. Learning to become more grounded and settled, and to bring our awareness out of our thoughts and into the present moment, are generally helpful things to do. However, there are some things to bear in mind.
Terms like ‘stress’ and ‘anxiety’ cover a wide range of experiences, from being a bit speedy to a clinical condition. The more extreme your experience, the more you should think about finding specialist help to support you through a process of which meditation is a part. Mindfulness courses are more tailored to problems like these than general meditation classes, and will teach you helpful ways to work with the patterns and attitudes that underlie stress or anxiety.
Past a certain point, mental health problems can make it hard to take on any new experiences, especially a subtle practice like meditation. Depression makes learning new things particularly difficult, and approaches like Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) are recommended between periods of depression, to prevent relapse. If you’re right in the middle of something, by all means try a little meditation, but this might not be the right time to go further.
In some cases, the space we create in meditation can mean that an underlying trauma comes to the surface. If you think you may be susceptible in this way, but you do want to explore meditation, you should take care and go very gently into a practice, remembering that you can stop at any time. In this case, having a teacher with whom you can discuss your experience is all the more important.