How To Meditate For Beginners - The Ultimate Guide
If you have come this far, searching for an answer to the question – ‘How to meditate’, you have already started walking down the right path. The guide, ‘How to meditate for beginners’ is meant to be a simple, yet effective, way to get you started with meditation. Before you start, you may note that a guide is just that – a guide. You can take the right principles from the basic underlying concepts and see how they can be applied to you, as a person who feels the need to meditate. You could, on the other hand, start your meditation sessions by simply following the guide – ‘How To Meditate For Beginners’.
Follow these easy steps
- Find the right location: The location you choose to meditate should be calm, isolated and free from disturbances. The idea of meditation is to keep your mind calm and focused on what you want to focus. Meditation is a mental exercise that would help you cope with the turbulence of life.
So, when you choose the location for meditation, you should create the right ambience that would be conducive for you to meditate. It could be any location, a quiet garden with little noise or activity, a calm spot in a religious place of worship that is devoid of much activity, or even your own room that is closed or that doesn’t have many disturbances. - Eliminate any scope of disturbance: If it is a place that you could control, you may inform the inmates of your meditation and direct them not to disturb you till you are available. Make sure you have switched your mobile phones on and have made arrangements for calls that you may receive on your landline.
Choose a time and day where you have already planned for your meditation in advance and where you have not given any prior appointment to anyone. Since this is your first attempt, plan it in advance and make prior arrangements. Till you get to the grips of meditation, plan your sessions well in advance so that your progress could be smooth and phased out. - Be seated in the right posture: With the right location and prior arrangements, seat yourself in an upright position, either on the floor or in your chair. If you are used to sitting on the floor, sit down on a folded blanket that would offer you a soft surface. Fold your legs towards you and lock them in front of you so that your legs are flat and parallel to the ground, with your right foot beneath your left thigh and your left foot beneath your right thigh. Place your hands on your knees; straighten your back so that your upper body is almost perpendicular to your legs.
If you are seated on a chair, make sure your chair has a good, firm back support and you are able to sit with a straight back firmly on the back support of your chair. Stretch your legs in front and come to a relaxed position.
In both the cases, you should be feeling comfortable about your sitting posture. Eliminate any condition that may disturb you, such as an incorrect posture or a seat that you may not count as comfortable. - Light your room appropriately: Your room should neither be completely dark nor should it be too brightly lit. Too bright a light in your room would only serve a distraction from your attempts to focus and meditate. On the other hand, a completely dark room with no light at all would leave you clueless, and may even be claustrophobic for some. The best way to light a place to meditate would be to have a low voltage, normal white light. You could sit facing East or West – and it would be appropriate if the light in the room doesn’t stare in your face and is placed wither to your right or to your left.
- Have a Focus Object: Meditation for beginners requires the right support. Meditation is a process that takes time and dedicated effort to master. You could compare the process of mastery over meditation with the process of a child learning to walk – to start crawling, to stand up, to walk and to run are processes that take time and effort. Some children could do it much easier than others, but that doesn’t mean the process is simple. All children need a support that they could hang on to, as they take their first few steps, till they become comfortable and confident in their ability to walk and run.
It is a similar support that you, the beginner in meditation, would need. If you are religious by nature, you could have a religious symbol or icon; or you could opt for a simple lamp or candle that is lit. The idea is to have a tangible object to focus on. With time and practice, you may not require such an object to maintain your focus. However, in the initial stages of meditation, the object or a flame would help you stay focused on your purpose and help your mind stay less agitated. - Start Meditating: The idea of meditation is abstract. The good thing about meditation is that you do not have to know what meditation, in its complete essence, is, for you to start meditating. With the right ambience, you would already have created the settings that you need to meditate. Now, build on the ambience with focus. Take your mind away from all the worldly worries that you would normally be engrossed with.
It is the tendency of your mind to keep hovering over mundane stuff and things that would make you worry. It could be anything, from your unpaid bills to a troublesome neighbor to the tussle that you had with your spouse last night. It is only when you try to focus on the object at hand that your mind would take you through everything that you did not want to remember. Your mind would indulge in constant chatter, with thoughts arising like a never-ending stream. There are two ways in which you could counter the stream of thoughts that lead from one to the other in a chain. - Focus on the Object: This is what the whole idea is about – to keep your mind so calm that you get to focus it on what you want to focus on. Keep looking directly into the object of focus that you have in place – and do not think of anything else. In a minute or two, you would have already had a lot of thoughts that are absolutely unrelated to your focus object, despite your best efforts to the contrary.
There are two ways in which you could deal with the situation. The first route is a comparatively advanced one that is meant for people who are already comfortable with the practice of meditation and who have a fair degree of control over their thoughts. This option involves getting back to the object of focus repeatedly till you get to stay focused. You could think of this process after you have got used to meditation, and when you are no longer in need of the guide, “How to Meditate for Beginners”. - Watch your Mind: Now that you are still a beginner, you would have to let your mind free to play. As someone who is serious about meditation, you should already know that you are dealing with your mind when you meditate, and that your mind is an entity that is separate from you, the person. Without getting too deep into philosophy or spiritualism, it would suffice to say that you and your mind are two different things and you could remove yourself from your mind, if you stepped back and watched it.
In this stage of your meditation, you should be aware and conscious of your own thought processes. As you try to stay focused on the object, you would realize that all sorts of unrelated thoughts occur in your mind. The trick is to stay away from these thoughts and watch them go from one subject to another, linking from one another. Try to stay focused on the object, while simultaneously, observing what your mind does. Invariably, as different thoughts occur in your mind, keep track of what thoughts arise and subside in your mind space.
For instance, the first thought might just as well spring from the light in the room – “this room is too brightly lit”. Then, the next thought could be “but it’s not as bright as the sun this morning”. The next thought would take a link from the second thought – “The road this morning was too crowded and with abnormal traffic”. The next stream could be – “Forget the traffic, there are so many problems that that Government has done nothing about!”.
In effect, you would have come to think of what the Government does and what it has failed to do, while staying in your room to meditate. This is perfectly normal for a beginner; and the best way to deal with the thought processes in the mind would be to watch it. Watch all the thoughts as they arise in your mind, as you would watch your pet move from one room to the other. With every other thought, your mind would return to the purpose of meditation. But just watch it.
