Two Ways to Meditate

“Am I doing it right?!”

Simplistically speaking, you could say that there are two different ways to meditate. In the first, it is all about getting it right or getting it wrong, about how well or how badly you do it, and about whether it meets your expectations as to how it should be. It is mostly about mental focus, the extent to which you have been able to silence, direct and control your mind. When you stray from your intended focus, you tend to see it as something going wrong, and judge yourself accordingly. At the end of the meditation, you will feel either satisfied or disappointed about your degree of mind control and about what—if anything— you think that you got out of doing the practice.

In the second, rather than trying to make something happen or block anything out, you practice accepting yourself however you are. Even though you might have an intention for the practice, such as staying with the breath or the sensations in the body, you are patient when you become distracted and curious about what shows up, such as memories, feelings and sensations. You might even choose to spend a little time investigating them before returning to your chosen focus. Rather than judge yourself, you accept that, for whatever reason, your mind, body and emotions are the way that they on this occasion. At the same time, you might playfully experiment with what helps you to settle, such as respectfully acknowledging and naming difficulties, or changing your attitude to one that is more patient and accepting. Whatever happens during the practice, you take it as an opportunity to experience yourself as you are, to practice bringing kind attention to whatever presents itself.

Anyone who has done some meditation will likely be familiar with the first of these two ways, which it is all too easy to slip into. After all, this is how we go about doing most things in our day-to-day life: we set out to achieve a certain outcome, we constantly evaluate our progress (which sometimes tips over into self-criticism), and we feel disappointment or satisfaction, frustration or elation, according to the results. In mindfulness language, this is often called the “doing mode of mind”, and is what has helped humans to achieve many great things.

But the invitation in meditation is to take a different approach, to cultivate the much-neglected 'being mode of mind', which is more about the journey than the destination. Rather than trying to achieve anything, we are quietly training in cultivating a different relationship to our experience. Recognising that many of the mind's unhelpful qualities are deeply ingrained, we patiently cultivate more helpful qualities, such as non-judgment, kindness, acceptance and “beginners mind” (seeing things with fresh awareness). The difficulties that we experience during meditation, rather than being something going wrong, are an important part of this process, because they enable us to practice approaching experience in this way.

Facing the Coronavirus Outbreak with Mindfulness and Compassion

These are extraordinary times, and the need for mindfulness, compassion and wise action has never been greater. Below are some suggestions to help us navigate through this unprecedented situation, not only to help us deal with all the difficulties that it continues to throw at us, but also to take the opportunity to learn habits and skills that will continue to serve ourselves, each other and the planet as a whole for the rest of our lives.

1. Wash your hands mindfully. Take the opportunity to slow down, washing your hands properly and thoroughly. With regular washing, this will repeatedly help you to come more fully into the present moment by focussing your attention on your immediate sensory experience – the water on your skin, the sounds, the smell of the soap, the contact between one hand and the other, etc.

2. Take time out. Setting time aside for meditation practice is more important than ever at such times. Whichever particular practice that you choose, keep coming back again and again to the present moment whilst compassionately acknowledging difficult feelings and giving them space. You can rest your hand on your heart, or your belly, or wherever in your body you feel those emotions most strongly, and really feel into the warmth and gentleness of that touch. At times of upset and uncertainty, the thought stream can be very strong and emotions can be very turbulent, so in your meditations as well as in your daily life do your best to cultivate patience and acceptance for what you are going through.

3. Move with awareness. Mindful movement practices, such as yoga, qi gong or walking meditation, can be very grounding and when emotions are strong some people may find these more helpful than practices where they are sitting or lying still. Movement also keeps you fit and healthy so that you can better resist and recover from the virus.

4. Recognise when your threat response has become engaged. When this happens, your thoughts, emotions, and perceptions all become threat-focussed, meaning that you will perceive the world in a very distorted way, and act accordingly. At times like these it can be helpful to remind yourself that you can't completely trust your thoughts right now and things will probably seem very different when you have calmed yourself down.

5. Catch the catastrophising. With even the slightest hint of danger, our minds can spin off multitudes of worst-case scenarios. It is our brain's attempt to keep us safe by preparing us for every imaginable eventuality. However, when this tendency is left unchecked we can lose touch with reality and find ourselves in the grip of fear and panic. Recognise and name these thoughts as catastrophic thinking, and let them pass. Acknowledge the fear and anxiety that is driving the catastrophising and hold these feelings with tenderness and patience. You can reassure yourself by silently saying something like “It is OK to feel this way”, or “Right now, I am OK”, or “I will deal with this one step at a time” etc.

6. Keep a sense of balance. We live in a world of stories – the incessant chatter and speculation of the media and the incessant chatter and speculation of our minds. It is important not to expose yourself to too much information if it is causing panic and despair, so consider what is a good balance when it comes to keeping yourself up to date with important information. When it comes to thoughts, it can be helpful to repeatedly ask yourself, “Is it helpful to be thinking about this right now?”. If the answer is no, then either drop beneath the thoughts and compassionately engage with the feelings (see above), or come back to the here and now – what you are experiencing through the senses.

7. Calm yourself down with 'Soothing Rhythm Breath'. When you notice yourself getting very anxious or unsettled, take a few minutes out to take some longer, slower breaths, perhaps breathing in for 4 or 5 seconds through the nose and then after a short pause breathing out for 4 or 5 seconds through a small hole in the mouth. Find a rhythm that is soothing and calming. This is not about pushing away feelings or emotions but about giving you more space around them so that you are able to manage them better. Do this as often in the day as needed, but particularly before bed or when feeling unsettled.

8. Nurture, soothe, nourish. Find ways to nurture and soothe yourself, and do these regularly and in a mindful way, so that you can really take the nourishment in. Examples might be taking a bath, self-massage, cooking a favourite healthy meal, hobbies, spending time in nature etc. Eat well, rest well and exercise well. Keep in touch with friends and loved ones so that you can express and receive support and love.

9. Make the most of Self-Isolation. In many cultures and traditions, people have taken time away from society to be alone in the service of personal and spiritual growth. If you are spending more time at home, try to use the time wisely so that this can be a time of growth and expansion. Rather than spending too much time plugged into electronic entertainment and distraction, use this as a time to meditate, to reflect, to write in your journal, to get creative, to learn new skills, to explore music, art, poetry and literature.

10. Stay connected with your heart. When in the threat response, we can get very fixated on our own and/ or our family's wellbeing and safety. At times this may be important and necessary, but whenever possible we can use this situation to cultivate the qualities of the heart, such as compassion, generosity, kindness and empathy. We can offer support to people that might need it, such as offering to shop or cook for the elderly, or phoning people who might be lonely. When we are having a hard time, we can remember others who are suffering too, not only from Coronavirus but from war, inequality, poverty, hunger and so on. We can cultivate the compassionate motivation to alleviate this suffering in the world, now and for the rest of our lives. In this way, as a society when we look back on this time from the future, we can see it not as a meaningless crisis but as a positive turning point in which we lay the foundations for a fairer, kinder and more respectful human culture.

Nose, Belly and Heart

On what part of the body do we place our attention during a breath meditation? In mindfulness, the most common instruction is to follow the breath as it moves into and out of the belly, or as low down in the body as we are able to perceive it. There is good reason for this. A lot of the time, we are so caught up in our thoughts that we can end up spending our lives inhabiting a very narrow proportion of our being, that is to say, from the neck upwards.

By dropping down below the chattering mind and into the belly, we are contributing towards a reversal of this trend of ever greater imprisonment within our heads. With each meditation, we are practising being more grounded, anchoring our awareness and generally moving towards a greater degree of embodiment. To be embodied is to stay tuned in to the body, and therefore able to receive the messages and feedback that it is continually sending us.

This means that as well as being able to look after ourselves properly, through knowing what is happening within our body and what we might be needing, we are also able to benefit from its input at the level of consciousness. So rather than only having access to the perspective of the analytical mind, we can draw on our 'gut feeling', whereby we have a sense of what feels right without necessarily having determined why.

However, as well as using the belly as a focus for the breath, there are other options that each give the practice a certain emphasis, and bring corresponding benefits.

If we are particularly interested in invoking the qualities of the heart, we can intentionally place our awareness in the centre of the chest rather than in the abdomen, and follow the breath in this part of the body. With each breath, we can invite in a sense of openness, friendliness and acceptance towards our experience, even if it is not always comfortable. In recent years, a number of approaches to mindfulness that emphasise the qualities of the heart have become increasingly popular, such as Mindful Self Compassion (see www.self-compassion.org) and Mindfulness-based Compassionate Living (https://www.compassionateliving.info/), and often the instruction is given to bring awareness to the heart centre.

Meanwhile, bringing awareness to the sensations and movement of the breath through the nostrils can bring a sense of wakefulness and can help to counteract sleepiness. It can be particularly engaging to note the temperature change of the inbreath and outbreath – cool air flowing in and warm air flowing out. Also, some people find that rather than increasing thoughts, bringing awareness to the nose with its proximity to the brain helps them settle this part of the body.

Imagining breathing into a part of the body where there is discomfort or pain can help us to step out of an aversive relationship with it, and instead be with the difficult sensations in a more accepting way. And finally, maintaining a general sense of the breath moving into and out of the whole body is an approach that many find steadies their awareness and cultivates embodiment.

Is there a right or wrong time to meditate?

When is the best time to practice meditation? For a sense of brightness and alertness, after bathing but on a relatively empty stomach (before a meal or a significant amount of time after one) is usually found to be best. Many dedicated practitioners get up very early in the morning, sometimes a long time before dawn, because they favour the stillness and serenity of the early hours, before the rest of humanity sets about its busyness. Others favour the evening, when the days activities have wound down and can be put to one side.

We all like to feel that we have been present and alert during a meditation, but why not also practice at all the 'wrong' times: when we are feeling angry, upset or agitated; late at night, when we are drowsy and dreamy; when we are really hungry or have just had a big meal; in the midst of a very busy day...? Or we can practice meditation precisely at the times when when we least want to.

At these times, we may not necessarily be the most settled or experience the greatest clarity in our meditation, but we have a special opportunity to explore and bring kind awareness to less common or desirable states of mind. We can practice patience and non-judgment when we get lost in the mind or drift into sleep or day dreams, we can experiment with ways to be with uncomfortable emotions, and we can investigate feelings that we would otherwise go out of our way to avoid.

Meditation isn't just about training the mind to be focussed, it is also about cultivating a different relationship with experience. In our meditation practice, we 'learn in the shallow end', that is to say we practice meeting whatever feelings that arise with an attitude of acceptance, curiosity, non-judgment and patience, so that we can do the same in our daily life. It is our reactivity to experience that causes a large part of our suffering. If we only meditated when we were feeling good, we would not have the opportunity to practice applying this mindful and heartful approach to exactly the kinds of feelings that we most often resist and struggle with.

Resistance is futile!

What do we do when we find ourselves resistant to our meditation practice? For people who meditate regularly, or who would like to, resistance is an all-too-familiar companion on the path. We all know the kinds of stories that our mind tells us—that we are too tired, or too restless, that we are not in the right frame of mind, that we will do it later—but going ahead and practising anyway, in spite of the resistance we feel, can be one of the most useful times to practice of all.

Resistance can become a valuable guide. Sometimes, for example, it can signal to us that we would benefit from a change in our approach to practice and what arises within it. Perhaps we have been somehow turning our practice into a struggle, for example by battling to silence a busy mind (never a good strategy!) or to suppress an uncomfortable feeling or emotion.

If we sense this might be the case, it can be useful to inquire, 'What feeling or aspect of my experience am I trying to avoid?'. As well as the more obvious candidates, such as grief, fear, anger or anxiety, we can also be seeking to avoid experiencing relatively more subtle mind states, such as boredom, agitation, drowsiness or worry. When these arise in meditation, we can easily think that something has gone wrong in some way, that we are not doing it right, and that there is no point in even trying.

In mindfulness meditation, however, we practice turning towards our experience rather than trying to push it away. Bringing a sense of curiosity towards these feelings and mind states transforms our relationship with our experience, from one in which are resisting something that is perceived to be 'in the way' to one in which we investigate—ideally even welcome—our present moment experience. Even in the presence of discomfort, agitation or the like, we can ask with genuine curiosity, "I wonder what it will be like to sit with these feelings, to experience myself this way".

The fact is that a big chunk of our life is spent resisting in one way or another. Whether it be resistance in the form of not wanting to do something (get out of bed, pay a bill, start a task or chore) or resistance in the form of wanting something that has already begun to end sooner (a journey, our work day, a phase of our life), we can so easily be caught up in fighting the unavoidable.

Practice gives us the opportunity to make friends with these mind states, which is a necessary step on the path towards liberating us from the negative impact that they have upon us. If within our practice we can learn to sit with our agitation, to breathe with it, to give it our kind attention, we can learn what it means to have the option not to be controlled by it.

Very often, resistance is all story and very little substance. How often does it happen that for weeks or months we put off doing something (filling in our tax return, sending an email, starting a project), in so doing tainting our life with that pervasive background feeling of unease, only to find that when it comes down to it, the object of our resistance was not so unpleasant after all. The task in question can even turn out to be quite enjoyable, or at the very least getting it done can usually bring a sense of satisfaction or of being on top of things.

So too with meditation practice: it is often the simple act of lowering ourselves onto the cushion that we resist, but once we are down there we may realise just how much we needed to sit quietly and let it all be. So when you next feel resistance, try just agreeing with yourself to sit for a few minutes, and then see where that takes you. Often you will find that you are happy to sit for the full duration.

Sometimes, of course, what you experience or label as resistance can have an important message for you, and some validity. Perhaps you really are too exhausted and in need of rest or sleep. Perhaps you have other responsibilities or important matters that you need to attend to. To discern when to listen to resistance and when to 'feel the resistance and do it anyway', it is helpful to know your tendency: are you someone who pushes themselves at the expense of their needs, or someone who is too quick to find an excuse not to follow through with a commitment?

A little experimentation is also helpful: sometimes doggedly following through with an intention to sit, whilst at other times shortening or adapting your practice (perhaps doing mindful movement or a bodyscan instead of sitting), or missing it out altogether. Caution is needed, however, because momentum and consistency are so very useful in establishing a regular practice, and so telling yourself that you will at least sit for a few minutes as described above is an invaluable strategy.

A final point to consider is that resistance can be a sign that our practice is right where it needs to be, that we are on the verge of something interesting. Resistance can be the last-ditch attempt to self sabotage as we come close to freeing ourselves from an unhelpful pattern… if we can only stick with it.

So next time resistance strikes as you make your journey down to sit on the cushion, take heart, and see what happens if you can turn the whole thing on its head, welcoming whatever feelings and mind states are there, investigating them with renewed curiosity and interest. Your resistance will likely dissolve.