“Many of us are afraid of going home to ourselves because we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us”
Thich Nhat Hanh – Silence
1. Just start and feel good about it
Set the bar really low so that you can’t fail. For example, if you’re a beginner, start with five minutes today and feel good about it. Feel good about showing up no matter what. If your mind was all over the place and you hardly focused at all, that’s still a successful meditation session because you’ve observed something about yourself.
2. Realise that it’s not just about the practice
The idea with meditation is always to have the spacious stillness from a formal practice bleed into other daily activities. It’s about being less reactive and more centred in all our daily doings, not just during a ten minute guided meditation. Being more centred means being more focused and in the moment. It aids us in doing the work that really matters. It helps us avoid thought spirals, and most importantly, it enables us to recognise behaviour fuelled by emotions based in fear and anger.
So, even though a daily practice is essential for cultivating mindfulness, it is also just one part of the equation. We really want to live more mindfully 24/7. We can reconnect with awareness in any moment by pausing (also see this post), or reflecting, or just taking a slow mindful breath.
3. Emotions are challenging
Observing thoughts but not getting taken in by them is one part of the practice. Another part involves recognising and accepting the emotions that surface during meditation. For me, the latter was by far harder than the former. Don’t get me wrong, I have days where I have significant thought spirals but their hold is less tight than something laden with emotional charge.
One might experience bliss during a deep meditation sitting—but one might experience the opposite: an intensification of some uncomfortable emotion. I don’t think this phenomena is always recognised in meditation circles and I’ve written other post about this. But realising this, realising that meditation itself might uproot unconscious emotions, can help us navigate that path more easily. In other words, Knowing that we might encounter difficult emotions might lessen some of the associated suffering.
4. Choose one mindfulness book and apply the principles.
The idea is to connect to the silence and spaciousness inside, not read a lot of books. That said, I do read a lot of spiritual books but I’ve found that reading and re-reading certain books have been more beneficial to me than ploughing through a lot of material. It’s better to take one book and really apply the principles. Mindfulness is not about accumulating more knowledge, it’s about experiencing ourselves and the world in a different way. It’s about connecting with the vastness that is inside us.
Two books that have been particularly helpful to me include, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and Silence by Thich Nhat Hanh. I’d recommend one of those for any beginner interested in mindfulness, but it’s important to choose something that you like.