"How to: Meditation"

If you asked me back in 1970 when I started meditating if I would ever see a book called "Meditation for Dummies" or "The Idiot's Guide to Meditation,"  I would have laughed at you.

And, sadly I would not have started two best-selling book series.

Seeing a how to meditation guide that looks like a how to fix your plumbing or how to car repair book seemed like the craziest idea I ever heard.  Way back then, meditation was some weird thing that strange people did.  It was for hippies or the counterculture or dropouts.  There were only a few scientists who had begun to explore the possibility that learning how to meditate could have health benefits, both mental and physical.

What used to be a difficult endeavor — to learn meditation and find a good meditation teacher — has turned into almost the opposite problem.  There are so many different how to meditation guides and learn meditation classes and meditation retreats and meditation teachers that it's a bit of the spiritual supermarket.

And like any supermarket, it's easy to walk up and down the aisles and just grab things and put them in your cart

There are some meditation teachers who say you need to pick a practice and stick with it no matter what, that you never find water, unless you dig one single deep well.

I'm not one of those meditation teachers.

They say that the Buddha taught 84,000 different meditation techniques.  One to each of his 84,000 different students.  He wasn't a showing off.  He recognized that each student is slightly different and needs something unique for them to really advance in their practice (whether he was successful or not is a mother story that I'll save for later).

Suffice it to say, my recommendation is somewhere in between digging a deep well and just filling your cart with meditation techniques and meditation supplies and meditation teachers.

I encourage you to try a meditation technique — give it a month or two or three and see if the technique fits your lifestyle and temperament.  If the practice requires you to spend one hour a day at a meditation and you're already putting in a hundred hours at work, then might not be the thing for you (or maybe just taking an hour off each day would be great, whether you're meditating or getting a massage!)

If you are the kind of person who has trouble sitting still, then maybe a meditation practice that asks you to sit like a statue is going to be more challenging than necessary.

One last thing I'll say is that in the how to meditation game you'll hear a lot of philosophy about how meditation works.  Why you should keep your eyes closed, or why you MUST keep your eyes open wide. If you put your hands in a special position or that special position.  Whether you need to sit on a particular kind of cushion or use no meditation cushion at all.

Everybody's got a theory that the only thing that matters is whether the meditation technique works for you. Whether you feel genuine effects, not just at the end of one particular meditation session, but over the course of a few weeks or months.

If you're noticing nothing after a couple months and the teacher says, "Just wait, that's not enough time to tell,"  You might want to try a different aisle of the market.

Next Post: A simple How To meditation guide

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