Practical Meditation Advice

To develop intentionally directed, stable attention, you must first have a clear understanding of its opposite, spontaneous movements of attention. Attention moves spontaneously in three different ways: scanning, getting captured, and alternating.

A helpful phrase to remember when dealing with distractions of any kind is, let it come, let it be, let it go. Don’t try to suppress it, just let it come into peripheral awareness. Don’t engage the distraction or focus attention on it, simply disregard it and let it be in the background. Then, let it go away by itself. This is a passive process.

Counting your breaths at the start of a sit really helps stabilize your attention. If you’re a novice, you should use this method all the time. Once you have moved through the Four Steps and attention is restricted to the breath at the nose, start silently counting each breath. Your goal will be to follow the sensations continuously for ten

The most effective way to overcome both procrastination and reluctance and resistance to practicing is to just do it. Nothing works as quickly or effectively as diligence. The simple act of consistently sitting down and placing your attention on the meditation object, day after day, is the essential first step from which everything else in the Ten

Interestingly, what you consider the start and end of a breath cycle matters. We automatically tend to regard the beginning as the inhale and the pause after the exhale as the end. However, if you’re thinking about the breath in that way, then that pause becomes the perfect opportunity for your thoughts to wander off, since the mind naturally tends

Begin with shorter meditations. I suggest 15 or 20 minutes each day for the first week or two. Then, increase the length of your sessions in five-minute increments weekly or every few days until you reach 45 minutes. Use a meditation timer rather than looking at a clock, and train yourself not to look at the timer. Just listen for the bell. Some