Meditation
from Dan Hollis
Five Easy Ways to Step into Meditation
Meditation is widely recommended as a health-boosting practice—and for good reason. It provides many positive benefits, from reducing symptoms of stress to relieving physical complaints like headaches and even enhancing immunity to illness.1 Between the health benefits and the fact that it's free and requires as few as five minutes, it's easy to see why meditation has become a popular complement to conventional medicine.
Basic Concepts of Meditation
Though it can be practiced in different ways, a few common threads run through virtually all meditation techniques:
- Focused Mind: It is a common misconception that meditation causes the mind to become 'quiet.' In reality, your mind is always thinking. Although your thoughts might not be as rapid, it is perfectly normal for your mind to be active when you are meditating. The key is to acknowledge this with compassion while bringing the focus back to the breath whenever you can. Meditation is like training a puppy to sit; the mind being the puppy, the breath being the trainer.
- No Judgment: The "Monkey Mind" is always active. That is its job. Instead of judging the active mind, simply learn to observe it. This will take time to get used to, which is why daily practice is so important. This creates a new focus on what is doing the observing. This is our "Atman," our higher self. We discover in us where God lives ("the kingdom of heaven is within you"). Silent Meditation teaches us to identify with who we really are - the observer.
- Being in the Now: Rather than focusing on the past or future, all meditative practices involve focusing on the present. Being in the now involves experiencing each moment, letting it go, and then experiencing the next. Focusing on the here and now takes practice, as many of us live most of our lives thinking toward the future or ruminating on the past.
- Altered State of Consciousness: With time, maintaining a quiet mind and focusing on the present can lead to an altered level of consciousness that isn’t a sleeping state but isn’t quite your average wakeful state either. Meditation increases brain activity in an area of the brain associated with happiness and positive thoughts and emotions, and some evidence shows that regular practice brings prolonged positive changes in these areas.
Meditation Techniques
Researchers generally classify meditation techniques into two different categories: concentrative and non-concentrative. Concentrative techniques involve focusing on a particular object that's generally outside of oneself such as a candle's flame, the sound of an instrument, or a mantra. Non-concentrative meditation, on the other hand, can include a broader focus such as the sounds in your environment, internal body states, and even your own breathing. Note that there can be overlap with these techniques—meditation can be both concentrative and non-concentrative.
There are many different ways to meditate. Think of the following categories of meditation techniques as a jumping-off point to understand the practices and differences among some of the main options, rather than an exhaustive list.
Basic Meditation
This involves sitting in a comfortable position and using the breath as a point of focus.
If you find yourself distracted by other thoughts or find your mind wandering,
gently redirect your focus back toward your breaths.
Focused Meditation
With focused meditation, you focus on something with intention without engaging your thoughts on it.
You can zero in on something visual, like a statue; something auditory,
like a metronome or recording of ocean waves; something constant,
like your own breathing; or a simple concept, like "unconditional compassion."
Some people find it easier to do this than to focus on nothing,
but the idea is the same, staying in the present moment,
circumventing the constant stream of commentary from your conscious mind,
and allowing yourself to slip into an altered state of consciousness.
Activity-Oriented Meditation
Activity-oriented meditation combines meditation with activities you may already enjoy,
or with new activities that help you focus on the present.
With this type of meditation, you engage in a repetitive activity
or one where you can get "in the zone" and experience "flow."
Again, this quiets the mind and allows your brain to shift.
Walking Meditation for Stress Relief
Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness can be a form of meditation that, like activity-oriented meditation,
doesn’t really look like meditation.
Mindfulness simply involves staying in the present moment
rather than thinking about the future or the past.
Again, this can be more difficult than it seems!
Focusing on sensations you feel in your body is one way to stay "in the now."
Focusing on emotions and where you feel them in your body—
not examining why you feel them,
but just experiencing them as sensations—is another.
The Health Benefits of Mindfulness
Spiritual Meditation
Though meditation isn't specific to any one religion, it can be a spiritual practice.
You can meditate on a singular question until an answer comes,
or meditate to clear your mind and accept whatever comes that day.
Many people also practice kundalini meditation for mind and body connection.
“Our calm is contagious”
How to use mindfulness in a pandemic
If you’re feeling extra anxiety these days due to the Covid-19 coronavirus, you’re not alone. This pandemic has us all facing more stress and uncertainty than usual. It also has many of us asking: How do we keep from spiraling into full-blown panic?
As we try to navigate our anxiety about the coronavirus, there’s one quote I’ve been trying to keep at the forefront of my mind. It’s by the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh: “When the crowded Vietnamese refugee boats met with storms or pirates, if everyone panicked all would be lost. But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive.”
Tara Brach, an American psychologist and a widely respected teacher of Buddhist meditation, sent out this quote in a recent email newsletter. It prompted me to call her up and ask for some guidance about using meditation to navigate this pandemic.
The first thing to know is that the word “meditation” actually refers to many different practices. In the West, the most well-known set of practices is “mindfulness meditation.” That means paying attention, purposefully and non-judgmentally, to your experience in the present moment. It can involve a formal practice — like when you sit down, close your eyes, and focus on feeling your breath go in and out. But you can also practice mindfulness while you read the news, say, or shop for groceries.
I talked to Brach about how we can use mindfulness and other meditative techniques to find balance during the coronavirus crisis, and about why this is not a selfish escape from reality: Many neuroscience studies have shown that meditating can help us regulate our own emotions so we can better pay attention to other people and act more altruistically.
A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows...
Sigal Samuel
I’m guessing that you, like the rest of us, have been feeling stressed about coronavirus. What have you personally been doing to stay calm and centered?
Tara Brach
Yes, like everyone else, I feel the hugeness of this and I feel fear for my dear ones and for the most vulnerable people in our world. What I’ve been doing is a mix: walking in nature and taking in beauty; talking to people and feeling our shared vulnerability and connectedness; and doing a lot of meditating. It gives me a pathway back to steadiness that’s just immeasurably helpful.
Sigal Samuel
For people who don’t have experience meditating but who are looking for a way to avoid sinking into the panic vortex, can you suggest one or two simple meditation practices that would be useful for our current situation?
Tara Brach
Sure. The first step when we get really gripped in fear is to calm our sympathetic nervous system. A simple way to do this is with long, deep breaths. Take at least three full breaths, counting to five with the inhale, and counting to five with the exhale. And with the exhale, intentionally release tension. That begins to calm down the nervous system.
Our breath is often the most helpful home base for coming out of our circling worry thoughts and back into our senses. But we can also come back to the sounds we’re hearing in the moment, or the sensation of our hands or feet tingling, or the sight of a tree or table. Coming back to the senses in our body helps us come back to the present moment. [SS: You can listen to a five- minute guided mindfulness meditation here.]
Sigal Samuel
In your new book Radical Compassion, you also offer a short meditation practice called RAIN, which I’ve found helpful. Can you spell out what the acronym means?
Tara Brach
Yes, I use the acronym because It’s an easy-to-remember handle if you’re getting caught in fear. It stands for recognize, allow, investigate, nurture. [SS: You can listen to a guided RAIN meditation here.]
First, just recognize, “Okay, I’m feeling fear.” Mentally whisper it, and that helps right away.
Then allow it. Just let it be there, don’t try to run away or fix it or control it or judge it.
Then investigate it. Begin to come into the body and just feel where the fear is in the body. Find out how it feels and breathe with it, with a gentle quality of attention.
And then nurture. You might just put your hand on your heart and offer a kind or soothing message to yourself. You can say to the fear, “Thank you for trying to protect me; it’s okay.” I sometimes will say to myself, “It’s okay, sweetheart.”
Sigal Samuel
I’m curious about the “recognize” part, this idea that when you can name a fear, it loses some of its power over you. What is it about that mental notation that changes the activity in the brain?
Tara Brach
When we’re in fight-flight-freeze mode, our limbic system has basically hijacked us, and we lose contact with our prefrontal cortex, the most recently evolved part of our brain, which has to do with executive functioning and making good decisions. When we name what’s going on, we start to activate the prefrontal cortex. Mindfulness reconnects us with that.
“THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT CAN HAPPEN RIGHT NOW IN THIS PANDEMIC IS THAT WE FEEL OUR COLLECTIVITY — THAT WE’RE HERE TO HELP EACH OTHER MOVE THROUGH THIS”
Sigal Samuel
Outside of a formal meditation practice, how can we use mindfulness in our daily activities while we’re navigating this pandemic? For example, should we be mindful of our news intake — how, and how often, we’re taking in updates about the virus?
Tara Brach
I think it’s good for all of us to take in the amount of news we need to take in to be informed, but also to know how to turn away from our screens. Listening to beautiful music or going outside for a walk will really nourish us. What the news will do is keep on agitating us. For some people what really works is [to limit news intake to] one time a day, and that can really make a difference.
Sigal Samuel
What about practicing gratitude? I’ve generally found that my brain can’t be anxious when it’s busy being grateful.
Tara Brach
Yes. Human beings have a negativity bias. We get very fixated on threats and often overlook goodness and beauty. So it needs to be an intentional practice to celebrate goodness. By that I mean that we actually pause and savor seeing the gleam in our child’s eye or watching the new blossoms come out.
Many people get gratitude buddies and, at the end of the day, they’ll send a note to their buddy naming three things they’re grateful for. That can really lift people up and change the mood.
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Are we morally obligated to meditate?
Sigal Samuel
I think some people in the West see practicing meditation as this very individualistic or even selfish thing, because it’s often presented to us as divorced from a broader ethical framework. But in Eastern traditions, meditation has always been part of this broader framework of moral responsibility toward the other. So what would it look like to make sure we don’t divorce it from that in the context of coronavirus?
Tara Brach
In China, the word for mindfulness is “present heart.” If we keep emphasizing the heart side of things, if we keep offering care to ourselves and others, that’s going to make us much more tender and we’ll live naturally from a more ethical place. The true impact of meditation is that it actually dissolves our excessive sense of self. It frees up our sense of connection with each other.
But if we think mindfulness is just something I do so that I can feel better in the midst of fear, then it’s going to have a much more self-centered feel.
So I think emphasizing the heart practices is critical. One of the heart practices is called lovingkindness. That’s where we take time to appreciate the goodness in other people. We might remind ourselves of the health workers on the front lines who are risking their lives to help people who are suffering. Or we might think of someone we know and remind ourselves of their humor, their intelligence, their care. And then we offer them our best wishes.
Sigal Samuel
Someone reading this might think, “Oh, so you’re just mentally sending someone a wish like ‘May you be free from suffering’ — that’s not actually doing anything to help them.” But I’m guessing the next step is that you also want to convey that to them out loud, right?
Tara Brach
Absolutely. When I wrote Radical Compassion, what I meant by those words is a mature compassion that has three elements to it. First, you’re feeling the caring viscerally in your body. It’s embodied, it’s not just an abstract idea. Second, the care is active and engaged — it actually leads to reaching out. The third part is that it’s all-inclusive: I’m not just caring about my sister but also about everybody in every country.
It might be that in the meditation we’re simply offering someone a prayer, but after that we’re much more inclined to reach out and make that phone call or go get someone groceries or medicine.
The single most important thing that can happen right now in this pandemic is that we feel our collectivity — that we’re really here to help each other move through this. And the truth is each one of us can help. We have a real gift to offer each other just by who we are and how we come forward. If we can find an inner refuge of calm, our calm is contagious.
Sigal Samuel
A lot of us are experiencing fear around our mortality right now, and in the West, that’s something we don’t talk about much. Do you think we should respond to the pandemic by leaning into that — uncovering the fear and bringing it up from the subliminal to the conscious level? Or is that a terrible idea?
Tara Brach
I think it’s not going to be a choice to bring it up. We will all be faced with the fear of mortality and the grief of loss. We can’t use our normal mechanisms to avoid it anymore.
When things fall apart, it’s a really horrible time in the sense that there’s so much suffering, but it’s also an opportunity for us to wake up our hearts in an unprecedented way. The ultimate gift of meditation is that it helps us come home to a space of presence that is large enough for whatever we encounter. And it’s from that space that we can actually live from who we most want to be.
A Word From Interfaith Fellowship & Dan Hollis
Whichever method you choose, keep in mind that a consistent practice—even just quieting the mind for five minutes a day—is more useful than sessions that are longer but infrequent. In the end, the best meditation technique and the one that will help you gain the most positive benefits is one you can stick to.
Also, visit this page regularly for updates and new information!
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