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.

There are many levels to this answer and it all depends how far you want to go with your practice. I would spin this question around and ask you, What do you want to get out of meditation? This is because there are so many benefits to meditation. 

Perhaps you want to feel less mental suffering, perhaps you want to find your purpose and live a more meaningful life, perhaps you want a tool to help deal with chronic pain or health problems. If you stick at it, meditation will absolutely shift your life in a positive direction. Sure, it may not be able to directly deliver you fame, money and success, but it can put you in the right headspace to be able to achieve those things. 

If I had to pick one “point” to meditation, it would be personal growth.

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.

When starting out, the simplest answer is focus on the body and its sensations. We usually use the breath as a starting point, but it’s good to realise that the breath is really a proxy for the body. When we are aware of the breath we are aware of its physical sensations of the body moving, as well as the sound of the breath. Because the breath is shifting and moving (it’s not static) it gives the mind a little more to pay attention to compared to other, more subtle bodily sensations. You can read more about this here. 

A more complete answer is that you should focus on whatever is prominent in the body and its sense fields (physical feeling/touch and hearing often being the most prominent when your eyes are closed). The senses and the breath are all different aspects of the same anchor to the present moment: the body.  

Later on in your meditation journey you may choose to explore Anapansati and Satipatthana, where we learn to explore feeling tone, the mind and aspects of experience as anchors to the present moment, but for now, keep it simple and focus on the body.

Mindfulness meditation is different from things like breathwork and pranayama exercises in that we aim to not control the breath in any way. Don’t try to make your breath longer or deeper because you think that’s what you should do. What you should do is just observe the natural, unforced rhythm of the breath. 

Your breath is simply an anchor to the present moment, something to focus on that brings you back when your mind wanders off. The intention of the meditation is to be present, not to have a controlled and relaxed breath. If you are trying to control it then you are forcing your expectation and you are not being present. 

It is very common for your breath to change in depth and cadence throughout a meditation, even several times over. It may be at times your breath is short, sharp and abrupt, or it may be that the breath becomes so subtle that it’s almost imperceptible. Sometimes, you may get into a very deep state where your breathing rate reduces to only two or three times per minute. In all cases the instruction is exactly the same: just observe it, just notice it, and let go of any need to control it.

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.

Yes, and in some ways, it’s actually a good thing. Hear me out. Getting distracted is completely natural. The mind is always calculating this or that because it’s constantly looking for ways to ease our suffering. Whenever the opportunity presents itself, the mind gets to work trying to figure stuff out–it starts thinking. Then when we sit for meditation the mind says, “Alright, here we go, some quiet time to start thinking!” So we start meditating, but actually, we’re thinking and are distracted from our practice. 

This is all normal and fine, don’t beat yourself up about it.The thing is, the catching of our wandering mind is itself a moment of mindfulness. In that moment you realise you’re away thinking you are actually perfectly mindful, perfectly aware. So the “distraction” has given you an opportunity to practice, to do the exercise. Eventually, all we end up doing is extending the moments of mindfulness into seconds, then minutes. 

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.

No, meditation is not religious. Meditation is a practice or technique for exploring yourself and your experience, that’s all it really is. Yes, the technique has its roots in Buddhism, but that doesn’t mean you need to sign up to be a Buddhist to meditate, just like you don’t need to be Christian to enjoy Christmas! In fact, any spirituality or faith that you already have is only likely to be strengthened by meditation practice as you become more attuned with your reasons. 

If you do want to dig deeper into the ‘why it works’ behind the practice, Buddhism offers a great explanation, and an intricate map of the mind and reality. That’s why I talk about some Buddhist philosophy in my courses–it helps understand what’s going on in the mind when we meditate. Understand though, in Buddhism there are no beliefs to ascribe to or dogmas to accept, it’s all about you and what you’re experiencing right here, right now, nothing more.

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.

20 minutes once per day is ideal when you’re starting out your meditation journey. In my introductory course we start out at 12 minutes and work our way up to 20 from there. If you can’t find the time for 20 minutes then do what you can, but aim for 20 minutes each day. There’s a great old saying that goes, “If you don’t have time to meditate, you should do it twice!” 

I can’t stress this enough: daily practice is where the gold is. If you want to see the benefits of a meditation practice move beyond your 20 minute sit and out into your life, practice everyday. Think of meditation as a proactive measure for your mind, not a reactive one. You want to be ready to swing when life throws you curveballs, instead of needing to take yourself to the emotional ER. 

I also always say that one 20 minute sit is better than two 10s because it can take a good 10 minutes or more to settle the mind sometimes. 20 minutes is a good starting point, from there you can go up to 30 then 40 minutes as you progress, or sitting multiple times per day. The more you put in the more you get out, it’s that simple.

Sit in an alert, upright position.

You can sit on a chair, on the floor, on cushions, with your back to a wall, or in full lotus position in the middle of the room if that’s most comfortable for you. Think comfortable but alert. Avoid slouchy chairs like couches, and try to get your knees below your hips, this helps create a small reverse curve in your lower back, which helps keep you upright and alert. Don’t be surprised if your body position changes during meditation. If you notice you’re slouched, gently right yourself when you notice, or just go with it if you prefer. 

Unless your body type really requires it, avoid meditating while lying down. It’s much easier to fall asleep, and if you’re sleeping you’re not meditating! 

Here is a more in depth article about the importance of posture while meditating: Article: How Important is Correct Posture in Meditation?

You should learn to meditate in silence. Forget the music. I know there are many apps that have nice relaxing background music, but this is only a distraction. Our goal isn’t to become relaxed, our goal is to sustain a state of presence and become familiar and comfortable with our own mind. Relaxation is a byproduct of this process. 

Music (and eventually voice guidance as well) is only a distraction. This is why I have no background music or ‘white noise’ in my online meditations.  

I say to everyone: rip the bandaid off and get comfortable with your mind. Dive into the deep end and learn how to swim! It’s only your own mind, after all, and trust me, there’s worse out there, you should see mine!

When we’re starting out, having someone guide you can be very helpful because the mind wanders off so much–it’s nice to have someone bring you back. Eventually, however, we want to learn how to do this by ourselves. This is why my 40 day Setting Sail for Daily Practice course starts off with a lot of guidance, but by the end of the course, I’m only keeping time and ringing gongs. This is very intentional, I want you to learn how to do this by yourself and not rely on me or anyone else. 

Occasionally it’s nice to put on a guided meditation (even I do this from time to time) as these can be good for reaffirming things or getting a new angle on practice, but your main daily practice should be just you and your mind.

You can actually do either, and you can mix it up as well. I usually encourage people to sit with their eyes closed because it’s a bit easier to get into your practice when there are less distractions, like things moving in and out of your vision. However, many people (especially some advanced meditators and those following Tibetan traditions) meditate with their eyes slightly ajar, softly focussed on a point about two feet in front of the nose. 

Eyes open meditation is also useful for bringing your practice into ‘normal’ waking life. To help with this, you can sit for a few minutes with your eyes slightly open at the end of a session, trying to retain your mindful focus. 

Having your eyes slightly open is also a good trick for staying alert if you feel like you’re nodding off into sleep. 

I teach all about eyes open meditation on my Setting Sail for Daily Practice introductory course, so sign up for that if you’re keen for more.

It really comes down to your preference and routine, there is no one time that is better than another. That said, I always encourage students to get it done first thing in the morning, that way you know you’ve done your mind exercise for the day. Often, when evening comes around, we find we’re tired and all we want to do is blob out in front of a screen, so the motivation to meditate can be more difficult to come by. But maybe you’re an evening person and the thought of doing ‘mind exercise’ in the morning sounds terrible to you! 

At the end of the day, it’s up to you. Just remember, the worst time to meditate is never and the best time is now 🙂.

The more the merrier, and the faster you’ll find yourself enlightened! Twice, three times, four times, doesn’t matter. If you’re on retreat you may find yourself meditating for many hours in a day over many sessions. So long as you take care of your physical health by getting enough food, water and rest, no bad outcomes are ever going to arise from meditating more. 

The one note I’d say here (because I know many people are tempted) is don’t substitute one 20 minute meditation for four 5s, two 10s etc. This is because you’ll get more benefit from a longer sit. One 20 minute sit per day should be the baseline. More than that, go for your life.

Don’t beat yourself up about it! We all miss a day here and there, and things like travel and visitors always throw a spanner in the works. But don’t worry, just get back to it tomorrow. What would you do if you missed a breath, or missed a heartbeat? Just take the next one and keep going. Just don’t make missing days (or breaths or heartbeats) your habit 😂.

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.

Yeah,absolutely. Why do we not sleep very well? Because we have a million things going on inside our head at once. Can we stop the mind thinking? No we can’t. So how do we deal with all these nagging thoughts about deadlines and personalities that stop us sleeping? We learn to have less attachment towards them. We learn to let them go. 

You are not your mind, and you are not the thoughts in your mind. This is a key understanding. Our problem is that we identify with our thoughts and allow them to take over our mind and control our behaviours. Meditation trains us to allow effective letting go of our thoughts and feelings. It helps us let them pass, like clouds moving through a sky.

It is the clinging to and identification with the thought that keeps you awake–the feeling that you have to do something with it–not the thought itself. If you can let the thoughts go, sleep will naturally occur. This is how meditation helps you sleep.

Yeah, it can. In fact, it’s even common for people to experience an upwelling of emotion in their very first session, or at various points early in their meditation journey. 

In our normal waking life we tend to push our emotions down, to bottle them up. Now, in the lightness of non-expectation and just being present–not trying to control our experience–they come bubbling to the surface. 

This is a good thing! Emotions have to run their course in order for us to move on with our lives. Unprocessed emotions control us subconsciously, so we need to get them out in the world, out of the mind and body. 

The good thing is that meditation is a very light and manageable medicine. It very rarely–if ever–throws you into the deep end where you can’t swim. When the emotions do come up, same as always, just observe them, and feel them in the body. Like everything else, when given space, they will pass, and when they do you will feel lighter and like you have grown emotionally. This is how healthy processing and healing

Not necessarily. It’s a very common misconception that we meditate to feel relaxed, and if we don’t feel relaxed we must be doing it wrong. This is an incorrect understanding of meditation. Meditation shouldn’t be anything, it’s simply a process of observing whatever is going on for you at that moment. If you feel relaxed, just notice it. If you feel stressed, just notice that as well. If you feel angry, notice it. If you feel happy, notice it. Whatever you are experiencing is what you are experiencing, try not to label it as good or bad or right or wrong. It just is. 

The relaxed state we get into during meditation is actually a by-product of our practice. In normal waking life we feel stressed because there are so many things going on at once. Things like deadlines and our own and other people’s expectations. When we enter a concentrated state during meditation and focus only on our breath, all the stress goes away because our mind is not being bombarded with all that stuff. This gradually turns into an ability to let things go in waking life, which helps the stress ease–like water off a duck’s back.

There are two schools of thought around this. The traditional school of thought says work with it. A lot of our physical pain is actually psychosomatic. That is, our brain makes it up. This isn’t to say that the pain doesn’t exist fullstop, but our aversion to feeling pain magnifies our initial slightly unpleasant sensation into a very unpleasant sensation. Perhaps your back was starting to feel uncomfortable. We inherently don’t like “uncomfortable”, so the brain magnifies the feelings of discomfort to make you change your position. 

This is essentially a self-protective mechanism. Your brain is trying to protect your body from harm, and better to do it sooner rather than later and make you change your position. The key to working with this type of pain is to observe it without any labels, trying to observe that you have aversion to it. You can read more about this in my article about my 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat. 

The second school of thought (which you’re probably going to like better), is that if your pain is so intense that it’s distracting you from your practice, just shift and become comfortable again. This will help. BUT, the key question is: Is the pain distracting you from your practice, or are you looking for a distraction from your practice, using your pain as an excuse not to sit and press deeper? The mind and the ego can do some tricky things when it thinks that its world view is under threat, and meditation is that threat. 

When I spent a weekend practicing with a couple of Theravadan Buddhist monks in Kaeo they had a good rule of thumb regarding pain: The first time you notice the pain, just notice and observe it. Come back to your practice and maybe it will go away. The second time you notice the pain, again, observe it, come back to your practice and your awareness may quell it. The third time you notice it, shift, relieve it. I think this is good advice. 

Read more about correct posture here.

Vipassana literally means “insight”, and it can mean two things. “Vipassana” (with a capital 'V') refers to the School of Vipassana Meditation, a well-known Buddhist tradition famous for their 10-day silent retreats. In this context, it also refers to the style of meditation as taught by the School of Vipassana Meditation, known (would you believe it?) as Vipassana meditation. This is a method of examining sensations throughout the body (and later feelings, the mind and aspects of experience). I teach a version of this method in my introductory courses. 

Historically, and more broadly, “vipassana” (with a little ‘v’) means ‘insight meditation’ not specific to the techniques of the School of Vipassana Meditation. There are various forms of meditation that produce insight, and these are often contrasted with samadhi (concentration) meditation.

All vipassana techniques are aiming to generate insight into the fundamental aspects of reality, namely suffering, non-self and impermanence. 

Read more about vipassana versus samadhi here, or read more about my personal journey in Vipassana here.

Samadhi is the power of concentration. Samadhi meditation (in some schools known as samatha, or calm abiding) is meditation that is single-pointed and focused. In these meditations, one focuses their attention on a single aspect of experience (such as the breath) and keeps bringing the mind back to that object. By remaining concentrated, one settles the mind, and instead of flitting around like a butterfly in the wind–as is our usual experience–the mind remains resolute and unshifting. 

The result is a mind imbued with increasing levels of calm and tranquility. Eventually, this sort of meditation can lead to jhanic absorption, extremely profound and stable states of meditation, marked by supreme happiness, peace and contentment.

Read more about samadhi meditation here.

Absolutely, no problem at all. For kids a common rule of thumb is one minute per year of age up to the age of 12, then up to 15 minutes, reaching 20 minutes by 15 to 18 years old. The technique is exactly the same.

The Buddha became enlightened by sitting on a small grass mat under a tree in the forest wearing basic monk robes. He didn’t even have a meditation timer! You don’t need any special equipment to start meditating, you just need to have an upright, comfortable seat (which can even be the floor), and a small blanket can be helpful as well (you can roll it around your waist and make a small ‘shelf’ at your stomach for your hands to rest on). 

This is all you really need. The rest is just fluff. Nice, comfortable fluff, by all means, but fluff nonetheless. When your eyes are closed and you’re deep in meditation none of it matters. You can read more about appropriate posture and the tools to get you there here.

You can read more about meditation posture here.

Because you’re tired. It’s as simple as that. One of my teachers once told me, “If you’re falling asleep when you meditate you need to take a nap”. And she was right. 

But it can go deeper than this, perhaps you’re always tired when you try to meditate. If your body is wanting to nod off to sleep as soon as you take all the external pressures off (i.e. when you start meditating), that’s a signal that maybe you’ve been pushing yourself too hard lately. You need to recover, you need to slow down. 

I would encourage you to take it easy for at least a few days, maybe come down from 150% to 80% or so. It doesn’t matter if you get less done, you never finish your list anyway! Chill, life is a marathon, not a sprint. Take a break. Your body (and your practice) will thank you for it.