A step-by-step guide to meditation for people who have never done it before, but want to give it a go.

Introduction

You’ve probably already heard that meditation is good for you and that you would be better off engaging in some of it.

However, if you’re like I used to be, you might be struggling to work out how to get started. In this article I’ll take you through some simple steps that will get you going.

The good news is that making a start in meditation is super easy. There are no difficult skills or techniques to learn. Meditation is one of those rare things that provides noticeable benefits from only a very small investment in time. You don’t need to make special shapes with your fingers, contort your body, chant incantations or say ‘ommmmm’ (although I do in fact recommend you give that a go if you’re game - but more on that later!).

The happy truth is you only need five minutes, a place to sit, and your own breath. Ten minutes is better, and twenty minutes is better still, but start with just five minutes a day and you’ll be well on your way.

Meditation isn't about following rules (although it does feel like there are a few). Everything I suggest here is just that - a suggestion. You do whatever works for you, and don’t stress if you don’t get every detail ‘right’. The details mean very little, to be honest. Just find those five minutes to breathe.

Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

Preparation

Find a time

I suggest you schedule your meditation sessions for first thing in the morning or last thing at night. Or if you can find the time, both is even better. For morning sessions, all you need to do is set your wake-up alarm five or ten minutes earlier than usual.

Find a spot

Identify a place where you won’t be interrupted. It doesn’t necessarily have to be quiet (although that might be preferable), but you want a spot where you’re not going to be bothered or interrupted - that's the key selection criteria here.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to meditate in the middle of a noisy crowded train carriage. When you’re starting out though, it’s probably best to sit at home somewhere quiet.

You may choose to sit cross-legged on the floor, or on a cushion. I prefer a straight-backed kitchen chair. It isn’t particularly important, so just pick whatever feels most comfortable to you. You can even do it lying down, although experts often suggest that your head should be unsupported - this is mainly to help prevent you from falling asleep. Perhaps more important is to make sure that your back and neck are nice and straight, and that your head and shoulders are relaxed and evenly balanced over your hips.

Bare feet on earth is great if you can manage it, but a wooden floor is also good. Again it’s not particularly important, but I do prefer meditating in bare feet.

Set a timer

This might be the most useful tip I can give you: Set a timer for your meditation sessions.

You’ll get the most out of meditation if you can empty your mind of stray or distracting thoughts, and that’s going to be much easier if don’t need to worry about accidentally falling asleep and missing your train!

While it might seem a little contrary, creating this little boundary around the meditation exercise actually creates freedom within it.

Execution

The paint-by-numbers steps

Let’s start with a simple list of steps - the TL; DR for this whole guide. I’ll break each of these down a bit afterward.

• Set yourself up in your chosen spot, and set your timer
• Close or half-close your eyes
• Take a couple of big, slow, deep breaths to get you going
• Breathe in slowly while saying the word “inhale” in your mind
• Breathe out slowly while saying the word “exhale” in your mind
• Clear your mind as you notice your thoughts
• Repeat until your timer goes off
• Finish with a feeling of gratitude
• Smash your day!

Those are the Cliff notes. Now let’s look at each of the steps in a bit more detail. 

Set yourself up

Set your timer for the time period that you’ve decided on.

Rest your hands lightly on your thighs or knees, or fold them in your lap. Take a couple of nice big deep breaths to start yourself off, then close your eyes. As I’m starting, I like to tilt my face up to the light and put a little smile on my face – an idea I got from the wonderful Stig Severinsen, a true master of breath control.

Bring into yourself a feeling of loving kindness, to put a little smile on the inside.

You’re all set now. Here’s what you’re going to do for the next five or ten minutes:

Sit and breathe.

That’s it. Just sit still and breathe.

The eyes have it

What to do with your eyes is something that might require a little trial and error before you finally land on what's best for you.

You can focus on one location or object (such as a candle flame); you can close your eyes completely; or you can adopt ‘tiger eyes'.  Tiger eyes is a technique where you half (or three quarters) close your eyes, covering the top half of your visual field with your eyelids and leaving open just a small slit in the bottom half of your field of view.

I believe that this technique - along with visualisations (more on that later) - works because it keeps your visual system 'online', while not flooding it with input.

Breathe

Breathe in and out through your nose.

As you begin your practice, don’t try too hard to control or change your breathing pattern. As you relax and settle into it, you may find that you naturally start to breathe more slowly and deeply than usual, but don’t force it.

Once your breathing has settled into a deep, easy and natural rhythm, gently hold your inward breath at the top for a few moments, before slowly and evenly breathing out again. Breathe out all the air from your lungs, then repeat the short hold on your next breath – gently hold your full lungs before slowly and gently emptying them again.

Now start to make your exhalations longer compared to your inhalations, until you're taking twice as long to breathe out as you are to breathe in.

If you have an awaress of your own heartbeat, you can use that as your internal metronome. For example, you might breathe in for a count of three heartbeats, hold for three heartbeats, then breathe slowly and gently out for a count of six heartbeats.

If you can’t sense your own heartbeat, just count in your head.

Your aim here is to quiet the internal chatter of your mind, by focusing exclusively on your breath. Please accept right now that you won’t be able to quiet your mind entirely. Thinking is a human trait and cannot truly be controlled (especially by beginners). Eventually, you'll be able to separate yourself from your own thoughts and not get so caught up in them.

The trick is to keep your awareness on your breath. You want all your attention to be occupied by your breathing, with all your senses engaged in it.

To make that happen, try one of the following two approaches:

- Count your breaths

With this technique you count ‘one’ in your mind as you breathe in and then out again, ‘two’ for the next cycle of inhalation and exhalation, and so on until you reach a count of ten.

At that point, you keep breathing while you re-start the count again at one.

When you find that you’re distracted by a thought, simply bring your focus back to the breath, clear your head and restart your count at one.

- Visualise the words ’inhale’ and ‘exhale’

The second method is arguably simpler and might be more helpful if you’re a complete beginner. As you breathe in, say the word ‘inhale’ in your mind. Then as you breathe out, say the word ‘exhale’ in your mind. It’s no more complicated than that.

Engage all your senses

As you practise these repeating internal mantras, you’ll become more effective in keeping your full attention on your breath if you bring all your senses to bear on the exercise. Listen to the sound of your breath, feel your chest rising and falling, pay attention to the sensation as the air moves through your nostrils.

The ancients referred to the third eye, which I believe might well be derived from the concept of keeping the brain's visual center active while your eyes are closed. An easy way to do this yourself is to visualise the words as you say them in your mind. I picture the word ‘inhale’ at the same time as I say it internally, so that it appears in front of me in my mind’s eye. I even make the word float towards me, expanding in size as it does so. The word ‘exhale’ floats away from me and shrinks until it disappears.

Similarly, if you’re using the counting method you can more fully engage the visual pathways by picturing the particular number you’re on. The more vivid the better. See the numbers in 3D and in glowing colour, perhaps with vapour trails or some other visual effect.

Clear your mind, then clear your mind again

The main point of all the breath focus is to clear your mind. As mentioned already, this is easier said than done. It’s important not to get discouraged here. You’ll find that, despite all your best efforts at achieving a Zen-like state of peaceful tranquillity, you suddenly realise you’ve spent the last five minutes thinking about what to have for breakfast.

Your thoughts will drift, that’s normal. Think of it like reps at the gym. Having a clear mind is a great outcome, but there’s even greater value in practising the process of clearing your mind after it has become cluttered. Repeatedly.

It would be great to have a clear and empty mind for this exercise, but you’re going to have to sweep it a few times if you want to keep it in that pristine state.

Here are some additional ideas for dealing with intrusive thoughts:

1. Categorise your thoughts. As each thought arrives into your consciousness, categorise it and visualise putting it into a box for that category, then return to your breathing. Those category boxes might be planning, mental exploration, rehearsal, recall, etc.
2. Imagine a big windshield wiper in your mind, clearing the thoughts away to the side of your mind. As the wiper returns to its starting point, you return to your breathing.
3. Imagine you’re lying face up in an endless field of soft grass, and that your arriving thoughts are little fluffy clouds drifting into view. Let the warm breeze gently blow those clouds back out of your field of view.
4. Imagine you’re sitting under water at the bottom of a deep still lake, looking upwards towards the surface, and that your thoughts are little bubbles rising up past you. Let each thought bubble drift up and away, eventually reaching the surface and popping out of existence.
5. If you’re using the breath-counting technique, start your count back at zero again every time you notice that you’ve been distracted by a thought. See how high you can count before needing to restart at zero. Even experienced practitioners often make it to just four or five before starting back at zero.
6. Imagine you’re sitting on a river bank in the fork of the river. The river is your thoughts, feelings, and emotions, flowing past you on either side, moving back out of your view.
7. Imagine a dark room or corridor with a big brightly-lit doorway at the opposite side. Your breath is a breeze blowing through that room or corridor, and your thoughts are leaves lying around on the floor. Use your breath to blow the leaves out the door, leaving the room dark and empty again.
   

Whichever technique you use (and it can be a different one every day), your long-term goal is to separate your thinking self from your witnessing self. Separate the thinker from the observer, and create some space between the two. Let your observer witness your thoughts without getting caught up in the actual thinking, and falling into the trap of believing that you are your thoughts. You are not.

Ommmmmmm?

If you’re embarrassed at the mere thought of chanting, just skip this section. I understand.

If you’re game though, you may find some benefit. It may seem a bit ‘woo-woo’, but there’s a scientific basis for why so many traditional customs incorporate some form of chanting.

The vagus nerve is a special nerve that mediates our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic nervous system engages ‘fight or flight’ mode, while the parasympathetic system engages the ‘rest and digest’ setting. The vagus nerve is responsible for communications associated with heart rate, digestion, and breathing. Unusually, this nerve is a two-way street - both sending and receiving signals between the body and the brain. It winds its way from the brain down to the heart, lungs, gut, and many other areas.

Also unlike most nerves, it does not primarily follow the spinal cord, but rather it runs just behind the vocal cords in the neck. So chants or similar low or guttural noises like humming or low singing, directly stimulate the vagus nerve and improve vagal tone.

Smash your day with a gratitude bomb

I like to end my meditation sessions with a silent little offering of thanks. I just have a better day after I do that, and it puts me in a good mood from the get-go.

I’m not even remotely religious - in fact I think I'm actively 'not-religious' - but I’ve realised the enormous power of gratitude. In this case, it's gratitude for the quiet, calming, still, spiritually refreshing moment that I’ve just been treated to, in my otherwise long, busy, stressful day.

Gratitude is a subject that could fill a whole article by itself, so I’ll just leave that there.

Parting thoughts

Guides like this one can’t help but offer suggestions and ideas to you, so we use words like “try” and “should”. However, an individual meditation session isn’t about changing anything or achieving any particular outcome or goal.

I came across a great analogy whereby the author (who unfortunately I can’t find again to credit) made the point that meditation is more like taking fish oil for long-term health than it is like taking an aspirin for a headache.

Going by that excellent analogy, you shouldn’t expect any one individual meditation session to make a whole lot of difference to anything. But you can expect to feel a little bit better a session compared to before, and the benefits really add up over time.  And those benefits are just as significant as you’ve heard - I would even dare to say life-changing.

While some of your meditations will feel more satisfying than others, every meditation is worthwhile no matter what. You’ll have plenty of sessions that don’t go as well as you’d have liked - for instance you might not manage to quiet the internal mental chatter even once, or you might not get into the flow, or whatever.

When this happens, just remind yourself that even the least ‘successful’ meditation still delivered a few precious minutes of stillness, peace, quiet and introspection. A lovely little gift from you to you.

Now go smash that day!