How to meditate (as a beginner)

Based on The Mind Illuminated, talks by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, and two years of personal experience. I'm no expert, just writing down my thoughts so other beginners might benefit from them (and so I can check back in a few years to see how wrong I was).

1. Sit in a relaxed position. Keep your back fairly straight (just enough that you're less likely to fall asleep).

2. Decide on a meditation object: e.g. breath sensations or ambient sounds. Make this decision firm in your mind. If you like, state it aloud or write it down. The point of this is to get as much of your mind as possible to commit to the decision.

3. Start a timer.

4. If you prefer, close your eyes.

5. Relax your mind. This means:

   • Don't push yourself to think about anything in particular.
   • Don't push yourself not to think about anything in particular.
   • Stay aware of the meditation object, and the other sensations in and around your body - feeling, sounds, etc.

6. Gradually, over the course of one sit or many, your mind will become calm. It might take a while. But eventually, thoughts and self-talk will quiet down. As this happens, your attention will naturally gravitate toward the meditation object, until finally it rests there without moving around.

   • The increase in calm won't be steady, and you can't force it to happen. If you notice your mind becoming more agitated and distracted at any point, just let it. It's not a problem. Eventually, it will become calm again.

7. Stop meditating when the timer goes off.

That's it!

Remember: even if it seems like you're not making progress, you can't fail at medita­tion. The only way to mess up these steps is to give up on meditating and intentionally think about something else.

Troubleshooting

Dullness

Drowsiness or mental dullness can result if you focus too intensely on the meditation object. This isn't desirable; you should be alert when meditating.

Dullness can be hard to notice in its subtler forms. To test for dullness, you can either:

• Wait for a sudden sound to surprise you. If it's distinctly jarring, causing an unpleasant mental buzzing or tingling effect, dullness is present.
• Open your eyes. If your eyelids feel heavy and inclined to close again, dullness is present.

If you notice dullness, you should:

1. Rouse yourself by exhaling forcefully through pursed lips, tensing up your abdomen and diaphragm. Pretend you are blowing up a balloon.
2. Relax your mind (see step 5 above).

Not knowing how to relax (overthinking)

If you find yourself worrying about whether you're really relaxing your mind, or forcing yourself to relax and therefore not really relaxing, I recommend following these steps for your next sit:

1. Go to https://benchristel.github.io/meditation.
2. Click "Begin" (this will play audio).
3. Sit and listen to the sound of the water, just as if you were sitting by a stream and had nothing to do.

Discoveries

Things I've learned, ideas that have helped.

• Attention isn't a mental "arrow" that you point at things. Attention is just something the mind does; it's not an object per se. The way you control attention is by singling out some object of awareness to become more intense. In other words, you control the mental object, not your mind.
• Directing attention feels like becoming interested in something. The more intensely interested you can be, the more attentive you will be. You have to get inside the mental object like it's a puppet. Make it sit up and talk to you. It's possible to do this because that object is in your mind. It is you, in the same way that your hand is you. It's like an appendage you never learned to move. Meditation is how you learn to move it.
• Notice moments in your life when you become interested in seldom-noticed things. Notice what that feels like. For me, the best parallel to sound meditation is playing a computer game and becoming interested in some "background" object like the ambient sounds or the skybox. It's a bit like watching a movie you've seen several times, where you pay attention to little details because you have the impression that incredible thought and care was put into every shot, prop, scene, and costume, and they're worth appreciating. If there's a movie you can watch in that way (for me, it's the Lord of the Rings trilogy) notice how it feels. Try to recreate that feeling in meditation.