When I first began Buddhist meditation in 1970 it was very difficult to find Buddhist books or Buddhist meditation classes or Buddhist retreats, or any other information that would help me get started with a daily Buddhist meditation practice.  If you mentioned the name "Dalai Lama," people thought you were talking about some sort of restaurant that serves sandwiches for South American pack animals.

Obviously the times have changed.

In fact, I would argue that were all a little Buddhist meditation happy right now.  What I mean by that is more and more people are becoming more and more infatuated with Buddhist meditation. In the town where I live, which has only 100,000 people, there are four Tibetan meditation centers.  There are three Zen meditation centers.  There are four Vipassana Buddhist meditation centers. And I haven't even started talking about all of the yoga, of which there are at least 15 different styles.

It can all be a little confusing if you're just getting started with Buddhist meditation.

Even if you become clear that you'd like to do Zen meditation, for example, there are two different schools of Zen.  And now we have some second and third generation Western Zen meditation teachers, some of whom have created their own branches of Zen that might not even be recognizable to someone from Japan from 50 years ago.

If Tibetan meditation interests you there are four different lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, and within each lineage there are numerous teachers who focus on one variation of a theme or another.  Some teachers have roots in more than one lineage.

And now there are some Western teachers who've tried to take the Buddhism out of Buddhist meditation.  In other words, they are teaching the basic techniques without the Buddhist philosophy.  These are often referred to as mindfulness meditation practices and many hospitals are  now using mindfulness meditation as part of stress reduction and anxiety relief programs.

So what should you do if you want to start meditating, and you're trying to decide which of the hundreds of hundreds of Buddhist meditation techniques to try?

I'm going to give you a suggestion that might sound a little odd. And that suggestion is: don't believe the promises.

That is, when you read meditation books, or listen to meditation CDs, or hear a meditation teacher speaking, you'll probably hear about cool-sounding states of consciousness that, if it's even possible to achieve them, require years and years of dedicated practice.  This is a great carrot the end of a very long stick.  Personally, I was chasing that carrot for about 30 years.  And, honestly, that carrot seems just as far away today as it did when I started.

The promises were all about what would happen in the future if I meditated more and more, for longer and longer periods, or if found a better practice… ideally one that promised enlightenment in one lifetime.  Once I stopped listening to the promises, I was able to ask myself a very simple question:  Does my meditation practice reliably produce results now instead of hopefully producing results in the future?

If you have to force yourself to meditate — because it takes 30 minutes until you feel any peace of mind, or can take weeks until you have an experience of profound clarity and spaciousness — then don't believe that you're not getting the results you want because there's something wrong with you and you just need to practice more and more and more.

Be willing to give something a good try for a few weeks or a few months. But trust yourself to know if it isn't producing the results you want now, rather than in an imagined future. And if not, then you might want to look somewhere else.

And don't be attached to needing a Buddhist meditation technique. There are many other meditation styles that can be just as, if not more, powerful.

I assure you that the benefits you get from finding a practice that fits you, that produces consistent and easy results, are far greater than any time you will have seemingly lost while you're on your search.

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