Meditation is the gym for the mind–it’s about putting our mind to work and making it stronger. Just like we go to the gym and exercise our body, we can also strengthen and condition our mind. By practicing specific meditation techniques, we train skilful mental states. These states are things like concentration, presence, awareness, kindness, dis-attachment and forgiveness.  When we practice meditation, we actively cultivate these states. 

Soon enough we start to embody our practice ‘off the cushion’, and beneficial outcomes permeate our life. Again, think about how when you work out in the gym, the results aren’t only present in the gym, you are stronger in day-to-day life as well. The same thing occurs with meditation and the skilful mental states we train in. The result is a strong, capable and grounded mind that isn’t tossed to and fro by the tribulations of life.

We could get a bit technical here, but I won't. For the purposes of an introduction to meditation, mindfulness means to bring one’s attention to an aspect of the present moment.

If you watch your thoughts closely enough, you’ll soon realise that all of them are in the camp of things that ‘could’, ‘should’, or ‘would’ be. They’re always focussed on things that are in the past or future, planning, scheming or reviewing. Implicit in this is the thought that you are not OK as you are, something should change. This is a normal function of the mind, but this ‘not-OK-ness’ is the suffering that the Buddha talked about. Sometimes it’s imperceptibly subtle, sometimes it’s even masked as something that seems pleasant, but that judgement is there. 

Being mindful equals being present, and in that state of presence the thinking, judging mind fades away. It’s just not there. There is an acceptance of things for how they are, and that feels easeful. This is mindfulness. 

Check out a more in-depth answer here in the article, Is It All About Just "Being Present"?

The basics of meditation are actually really easy. Just think of it like you're learning a new skill. With any new skill there is always a learning curve, but within just a few weeks of steady practice you’ll have a daily habit that will ground you throughout life. 

Interestingly, people who are struggling in life with things like depression, anxiety and mental health challenges often find it easier to start meditating. This was the case with me. It’s because the mind is primed and searching for meaning, it’s just not finding it where it’s looking. Meditation comes along and sort of directs the search–it helps align the different parts of the brain and gets the pieces to fall into place. You can read more about this here. 

Yep, anyone can meditate. I’ve never met someone who can’t. It doesn’t matter if you’re 8 or 88, healthy or sick, have a mind like a calm ocean, or a caged wild cat, literally anyone can meditate. It might be that it takes some people longer than others to ‘get it’, but given time, persistence and the right teacher (that’s me!) anyone can master this skill.

Of course, everyone has a different starting point–some minds are busier than others, some are darker than others, some are more flexible than others–but ultimately, anyone can learn to sustain a state of presence and gain the resulting benefits. 

If you’ve been struggling to get going with a meditation practice, think about getting in touch and asking about my one-on-one tuition.

In short, meditation works by unifying the different parts of the mind and body, and by unifying the body-mind complex with the world around it. 

At the end of the day, the human being is best described as a series of processes, not as a discrete, fixed identity. If not tended to, these processes (which include all of the stories we tell ourselves about our version of reality) can get out of sync with each other, and with the outside world. This ‘out-of-syncness’ feels, to the conscious human being, like dis-ease or unsatisfactoriness. It feels unpleasant. It is dukkha, to use Buddhist language. 

This unsatisfactoriness may manifest itself in many ways, such as guilt, depression, fear, anxiety–insert your issue here–but at the end of the day it all boils down to a body and mind that is out of alignment with itself and the environment. 

Meditation fixes this by allowing the important process of integration (syncing) to happen. As you quieten your mind, the connectivity between neural structures across the brain and body is increased–all of your different parts and processes start talking to each other more effectively. By this action of increased connectivity and better syncing of your neural architechture, meditation integrates the body, mind and environment. 

This can take you all the way to seeing the fundamental structure of reality, past all of your narratives, all the way to enlightenment, if you choose to take it that far!

For beginners, the mindfulness of breathing technique is best. 

For this, close your eyes and bring your focus gently to the breath (you may feel this around your nose, through your chest or belly or any other place in your awareness). Don’t try to control your breath in any way, think natural breathing, no control. Soon enough, your mind will wander off and eventually, you will notice that you are no longer focused on your breathing. When you realise this, gently and kindly bring your attention back to your breath. 

This is the practice: focus on breath (with no control), mind wanders off, bring attention back to breath. It might be that you can initially only retain your focus for half a breath at a time and your mind is continuously wandering. That’s ok, this is a new skill and new practice. Just keep bringing it back and eventually you will become better and you will feel your mind settling. 

Sign up for my free five-day video course here.

It really is as simple as closing your eyes and watching your breath. Don’t try to control your breath in any way, don’t make it longer or deeper or anything you think it ‘should’ be, just watch it as it naturally is. When you notice that your mind has wandered off into a thought, simply bring it back to your breath.

Be compassionate to yourself throughout the experience–this is a new skill you’re learning and Rome wasn’t built in a day. Then just keep going, do it for at least 20 minutes everyday. Lastly, don’t expect miracles! Expectation is the enemy of meditation. In fact, it’s best to expect nothing at all! Yes, that’s a paradox, but trust me, it works. You can read more about that here. 

Better than giving it a go by yourself, sign up for my free five day introductory course here.

As much as I want you to sign up for one of my courses, the truth is that you don’t need a teacher to start meditating. You need to learn the basic technique from somewhere, but once you have that, you can actually get a long way by just paying attention to, and following your intuition. 

Of course, a teacher is a lot of help. There are many common mistakes and pitfalls when starting out meditating, and having someone who you can bounce questions off and get feedback from–especially someone who has the lived experience of a daily meditation practice–can be invaluable. A teacher can also help keep you accountable, keep you on the path. 

If you want to try me out as a teacher, check out my free dive day video introduction course.

If you want to go past basic meditation into things like Satipatthana practice and Buddhist Dhamma, a teacher or guide is reasonably essential.

This is an age-old question that has no single answer. It all depends on you. For many people results can be felt after a single session, and one of the most common things I hear early on in any course is, “Wow, I had a really good sleep after that first session”. So real world results can be seen very quickly. 

For other people, it may be some weeks or even months before you start to notice subtle changes in your life. For me, it was after about three months of daily practice that I knew it was working. I recommend a daily practice of three months before you consider reviewing whether it’s worth it or not.  

As with all of this stuff, the best approach is to have no expectation and to trust in the process. When you take up going to the gym you don’t notice immediate improvements in your health and strength after day one, but you know if you keep at it the results will come. The same is true of meditation. Trust in the process without expectation and you’re halfway there! You can read more about this attitude of ‘no expectations’ here.

In terms of the technique used, there is no difference between beginner mindfulness and basic Buddhist meditation. Indeed, the Buddha taught the mindfulness of breathing technique to many followers and it has been practiced for thousands of years since. You can read about how mindfulness came to the West here. 

In terms of the application of meditation in everyday life, the difference can be significant. 

Mindfulness teaches someone to become more present, Buddhist philosophy then guides a meditator on how to achieve deeper and longer lasting liberation from suffering. This is (in a nutshell) done through the development of wisdom and compassion, and living an ethical life.

The key difference between Buddhist meditation and secular mindfulness is ethics.

Importantly, living a life grounded in ethics supports good meditation practice. The less harm you create and the more good you do, the more you will get out of your meditation practice, because a mind that is free of remorse is a pre-condition to the deepest levels of meditation.

Building a daily practice is all about routine. It takes some dedicated time of course, but it’s worth it in the end. Set yourself a daily reminder and work it into your current routine. Wake up, have a coffee, meditate, breakfast, work, or whatever order you want to do it. The key thing is to just make it part of what you do, no questions asked, no excuses. If you’re trying to ‘find time’ in the day to meditate, it probably won’t stick. You need to prioritise it, just like you do for meals. In a few short weeks you’ll have gotten over the hump of engraining this new habit and it’ll just be something you do. In my Setting Sail for Daily Practice course I support students to do exactly this, to make meditation part of their lives.

Yes, absolutely, and the way it does so is quite interesting. We feel stressed or burnt-out because we have four million things going on at once and not enough time in the day to do them all. There’s work and all of the dynamics that go with that, laundry, cleaning and house chores, relationships to manage, food to prepare, exercise to do, and all the other expectations we place on ourselves. The mind jumps from one thing to the next, to the next and the result is a feeling of stress and agitation, maybe even anxiety. 

Meditation trains us to keep the mind concentrated on one object at a time, and it’s that retraining of the mind to be single-pointed and focussed–to not just follow every whim that crosses the consciousness–that results in the alleviation of stress. It’s actually about training a light and subtle, intentional concentration. This sort of concentration is the antidote to stress.

It sure can, and very effectively as well. I’ll try to keep this brief. 

Our mind is full of stories about how we want the world to be, or even, how we expect the world to be. At the end of the day, the mind is entirely made up of these stories, it is nothing but narratives. The thing is, sometimes the world doesn’t agree with our version of events, our stories. It shows us that some other version of reality is the truth–we were wrong. 

When this gap between our stories about reality and what we actually observe in reality gets large enough, this produces feelings of unsatisfactoriness or suffering (dukkha, in Buddhist language). When these feelings persist for a long time and we start to spiral downhill because of what we think this misapprehension of reality means for us, this is called depression. The fear of creating more misalignment with reality through our actions is anxiety. 

When we meditate, we take our mind and body through a process of integration with the world around us. We effectively rewrite the stories, one line at a time, one understanding at a time, and so the gap between our internal world and the external diminishes. With this diminishing gap, the feelings of anxiety and depression are also reduced. This is, in a nutshell, how meditation helps alleviate anxiety and depression. 

You can read more about why meditation is so effective at this rewriting here.