How to Do Mindfulness Meditation

To get started practicing mindfulness, you don't need to make any huge commitments of your time. Just taking five to ten minutes out of your day is enough to start reaping the benefits of mindfulness. I like to think of my meditation sessions as time I take to stop and be kind to myself. Meditation gives me a chance to rest and get to know my own mind more deeply. It's a gesture of compassion, an act of making friends with myself. Find a comfortable place to sit. It could be on a chair or a cushion on the floor. You can also lie down if you want, as long as you don't fall asleep. This is a good piece of advice I got from an experienced Thai Buddhist monk in one of many ancient temples in the city of Chiang Mai: to protect yourself from falling asleep and making sure you will be more alert, you might want to lie down on your side, while resting

your head on your hand, like a statue of lying Buddha. This way, if you start falling asleep, your head will slip from your hand and you will immediately go back to alertness. When sitting, the most important point is to keep your back straight but relaxed, as if your spine were a stack of coins. If the coins lean too far in any direction, they'll topple over. So try to keep your spine as vertical as possible, but without any strain. Take a few moments to really feel the presence of your body where you are. Feel the weight of your body as you sit on the chair or cushion. This brings the body and mind together. It brings the mind into a present, sensory awareness of the body. Draw a deep breath down into your stomach, then let it out like a big sigh. Pay attention to the sensations in your body. Do they feel good or bad? Are your muscles tensed or relaxed? You don't have to try to change anything, particularly; the point is just to be aware of any pleasant or unpleasant feelings. The main part of the session is to turn your attention to the breath, so that your mind is filled with an awareness of the breath. As you breathe in, pay attention to the sensation of breathing, the way the inbreath feels in your nostrils, how the air fills your lungs as your chest and diaphragm expand. As you breathe out, your mind follows the breath, moving through your nose and dissolving into the space outside you. To keep your mind from wandering from the breath, you may find it helpful to count. As you breathe in, count one in your head. As you breathe out, two. Count this way up to ten, then start again from one.

Don't worry if you become distracted. Distraction is a natural part of the practice. All sorts of thoughts and feelings will come up. Maybe you'll find yourself thinking about some work you have to do. Maybe, in your mind, you'll take a little vacation to Thailand or the Bahamas. Whatever the case, whatever arises in your mind is just thinking. It's neither good nor bad. Mentally label it thinking, without judging it, then gently return your mind to the breath, starting the count again from one. As you mature in your practice, you might find that counting the breaths is just a little too much. You crave something a bit more subtle, a lighter touch. In that case, you can drop the counting and just pay attention to the sensation of the breath as it goes in and out, the rise and fall of your chest and diaphragm, whether the breath is long or short, deep or shallow, whether or not you pause between breaths. You'll soon find that the breath has many subtleties and variations. Remember you don't need to alter anything about the breath. The point is not to try to change your breath or improve it in any way, but just to be with it. Let the breath fill your whole awareness. Let your mind get so absorbed in the breath it becomes one with it. Again, after some time, it may seem that even paying attention to the in and out of the breath without counting is too overbearing a technique. Then you can try this: on the inbreath, rest your mind on the breath, become one with the breath. On the outbreath, completely relax your attention and don't focus on anything. As the outbreath dissolves into air outside you, let your attention also dissolve into space. On the inbreath, stay with the breath. On the outbreath, dissolve into openness. This is a transition between mindfulness of the breath and objectless meditation. In objectless meditation, you just rest your mind. You don't rest it anywhere, particularly, but you just let it be with the general space within and without you.

You become one with that space. Your attention is on the totality of the present-moment environment as opposed to whatever is happening within it, so your mind becomes expansive and accommodating. In objectless meditation, you’re not directing the attention anywhere, but you’re also not distracted. Instead, you rest in a pervasive, precise awareness. Finally, I want to say a word about consistency. If you really want to see the most positive results from the practice of mindfulness meditation, it is necessary to establish a daily practice and maintain it consistently. You don't have to sit for marathon sessions several hours long, as veteran meditators do. You can start seeing the benefits of mindfulness meditation, as I said above, with as few as five to ten minutes a day.