Meditation Basics

How should I start my meditation?

Everyone meditates differently, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that works for everyone. But generally, every jhana meditator practicing anapanasati will follow the same basic roadmap: Find a comfortable position, relax the body, and gently bring your attention to wherever you feel the sensation of your breath most clearly. For me, that’s at my upper lip, but for others it might be more in their chest or belly. Wherever you locate your breath, it’s important to remember that this attention you’re bringing to it isn’t a strenuous, constant mental effort where you drill down on that one particular spot and keep your mind there through sheer force of will.

Instead, you should work to develop a loose, whole-body awareness that radiates out from that point. An old teacher of mine used the metaphor of a candle, which burns brightly in one place but illuminates everything around it. In the same way, while the sensation of your breath should be most noticeable at the spot you’ve chosen, you should always make sure that your attention isn’t shrinking to just that spot. If you find yourself struggling to develop this kind of whole-body awareness, it can help to identify three or four points across the body – maybe your knees and elbows, or your head, chest, and feet – and try your best to be aware of all of them at once as you breath in and out. Or, if even that seems too difficult at first, you can try to cycle through them with each new breath until you eventually bring them all together.

It might also help to scan your body slowly from head to foot, moving up and down in little increments between every new breath. While doing this, you might find one particular spot where the breath feels especially good, and you’re more than welcome to “camp out” there for a while as your concentration deepens. Just like there’s no particular posture that’s inherently better than any other, there’s no place on the body you should feel pressured to watch – so feel free to spend your whole session focused on your toes if that’s really where your breathing feels best!

How should I breath during meditation?

When you first start out meditating, don’t focus too much on how you “should” be breathing; don’t try to breathe especially deep, or especially shallow, or any particular way at all. Just let your body find its own natural rhythm, until you feel like you’re no longer in control of your inhalation or exhalation at all. This can a little tricky, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with subtly guiding your breathing if you feel like you can’t let go entirely at first. Still, your ultimate goal should be getting to the point where you feel like you’re just watching yourself breathe, rather than actually making the in-breaths and out-breaths happen manually.

Once you reach this state, you’ll notice pretty quickly that your breaths will naturally become very shallow, and you might even start worrying that you aren’t breathing enough. But don’t worry, there’s no risk of self-imposed suffocation! You’re just entering a state of relaxation and focus where your body’s need for oxygen is lower than you’re used to. If you really feel uncomfortable, you can always slowly lengthen your breaths to get more air – just don’t take one big gulp all at once, or you might throw yourself out of the peaceful state you were entering right as it was just getting good.

What should I do with my eyes during meditation?

This might seem like a weird question to ask, considering the vast majority of meditators keep their eyes closed the entire session. But exactly how you keep your eyes closed really matters! You don’t want to be squeezing them shut with a lot of extra effort, which is something a surprising number of meditators tend to fall into without thinking. To counteract this, it can help to start a meditation session by intentionally relaxing your facial muscles and letting your lids fall naturally. It’s even okay if they don’t close all the way and you still see a little bit of what’s in front of you on the bottom edge of your vision. Give it some time, and they’ll eventually close by themselves – but even if they don’t, it’s really not a problem.

Another habit to watch out for is inadvertently “pointing your eyes” towards whatever part of the body you’re focusing on. As someone who tracks their breathing at the tip of my nose, sometimes I’ll start to feel a little sore and realize I’ve slowly gone cross-eyed! Having your eyes held downwards or to either side can lead to headaches and strain over time, so make sure to keep them unfocused and looking straight ahead at the back of your eyelids. This is especially important when you start to scan the body, since any unconscious eye movement back and forth can really short-circuit the developing feeling of peace and stillness. If your attention on some particular body part ever feels a little rigid or unpleasant, or you’re having trouble transitioning from that body part to a more open, full-body awareness, take a second to check in on where your eyes are; chances are, mindfully bringing them back to that forward position will help relieve the tension.

What should I be thinking during meditation?

Unfortunately, there tends to be a stereotype in western culture that meditation is just about “emptying your mind” until you’re completely thoughtless. But this is actually really bad advice for jhana meditation. Rather than trying to empty your mind until it’s entirely devoid of thoughts at all, your goal should actually be to do the opposite: You want to fill your mind completely with the breath, until every aspect of your cognition is aimed at it in some way. Many new meditators burn themselves out immediately by trying to tamp down anything and everything that isn’t some pure, unadulterated awareness – but five minutes into a meditation session, you aren’t at the point where conscious thought or conceptual analysis is something to be avoided.

In other words, don’t feel bad about thinking! You should absolutely be making mental remarks like “Hey, I feel the breath on my nostrils a little better when I lean forward” or “Hm, I just realized my shoulders were a little tensed up,” and you should absolutely be asking yourself questions like “How does it feel when I inhale like this?” or “When I focus on my chest, is the breath more noticeable when rising or falling?” As you get deeper into meditation, this sort of thing will fade away and be replaced by a more direct, unmediated awareness. But as long as you’re thinking about anything, you should make sure it’s the breath.

This is why I encourage meditators to make this commitment to themselves: With every single in-breath and out-breath, I’ll notice at least one thing about how my body felt. You don’t necessarily have to say each observation in your head as a full sentence, but you should think it concretely enough that you’re crowding out other distractions from your mental space until your focus deepens.

What should I do if I lose focus, or can’t get focused to begin with?

At the beginning of every meditation session, there will be at least a few minutes where keeping your attention on the breath feels like a real chore. You’ll find yourself hopping between all sorts of weird stuff – the temperature of the room, lines from TV shows you just watched, embarrassing moments from second grade, whatever – and having to pull yourself back to the breath over and over again. You definitely won’t get a hit of peace and clarity right away. In fact, your mind might feel even more scrambled than usual for a bit! This is perfectly normal, and actually a really good sign.

When mindfulness starts to develop, it makes the sensation of your breath a little more vivid, but it also makes everything else going on in your head a little more vivid too. This can make things feel like a bit of a free-for-all until enough concentration develops enough to narrow your focus. Don’t get discouraged! Once things settle down and your breath grows calmer, those other thoughts will start to fade away and you’ll be able to really lock in. Still, it’s inevitable that you’ll sometimes lose focus on the breath and start to think about other things, even deep into your session. That’s perfectly fine!

But whenever you do realize that you’ve drifted away, you need to reset and come back immediately. I can’t stress this particular point enough: By far the most effective skill you can develop at the beginning of a meditation practice is the ability to cut off a train of thought the moment you realize you’re on it. If you realize you’re thinking about a movie you saw last weekend, don’t let yourself keep going until the scene you’re imagining finishes; if a funny idea for a tweet pops into your head (talking to myself here) then you can’t think, “Okay, I’ll get back to the breath once I get the wording right.” Mindfulness and concentration are resilient qualities that can survive even a bunch of momentary digressions, but actively deciding to abandon the breath will really set you back. So whenever you realize you’re not on the breath, just stop – don’t think about what was distracting you, don’t beat yourself up for letting it – and come back, no matter how many times it takes.4

How can I make my concentration deeper?

There are dozens of little tips and tricks for building concentration during the early stages of a meditation session, but I’ll just cover two big ones that will be very useful when you’re just starting out. The first is counting as you inhale or exhale, which can really help to keep you tethered to the breath and prevent you from drifting off to other things. I like to go from one to eight and then back down again, but it might be better to start with a smaller number like five if you find yourself losing track too quickly. You can count when you breathe in, or when you breathe out, or during the moment in between. Just make sure that you don’t start stretching out the “ooooonnnne, twwwooooo…” in your head to fill up the whole breath – if you try to match them up perfectly, it’s too easy to let the counting control the breath and not the other way around.

Another thing that can really help is having a word or short phrase to mentally recite on each in-breath and out-breath. What word you pick doesn’t really matter, as long as you have something to engage yourself with so you keep your focus steady and your mind free of distracting thoughts. One popular word that’s often used by meditators in the Thai tradition is the Pali term ‘buddho,’ with the meditator thinking ‘boo’ on the in-breath and ‘doh’ on the out-breath.

Personally, I like to use the phrase, ‘not me, not mine,’ which I split over two cycles of breathing – ‘not’ when I breathe in, ‘me’ when I breathe out, ‘not’ when I breathe in, ‘mine’ when I breathe out, and then repeat. I’ll also sometimes use the three-part cycle “I am nowhere, I am no one, I am nothing,” with each line being mentally repeated across one entire breath. Feel free to experiment with whatever words or phrases work best for you! Just be willing to drop them gently once you feel like your concentration is deep enough – at a certain point, they can start to hold you back.

How do I know when my concentration has developed enough?

After a period of consistent practice, you’ll reach a point where your attention really settles down. Some meditation teachers call this stage “access concentration,” but I’m not convinced that concept is actually very helpful. It’s better to just think of this as the period where your breath is the dominant, but not sole, object of your attention. You’ll still have distracting thoughts and sensations pop up from time to time, but they’ll be largely in the background – they’ll be things you think about while you’re watching your breath, instead of things you think about instead of watching your breath. Even this level of stillness and concentration, which is much weaker than the experience you’re ultimately aiming for, can be refreshing and enjoyable. So once you feel like you can consistently reach this point, feel free to celebrate!

There are a few helpful ways to recognize that you’re in this stage. The one that was most obvious to me is that your mindfulness will “catch” the intention to do something before that intention actually triggers a response. You’ll notice the sensation of saliva in your mouth, for example, or an itch on your arm, and instead of automatically swallowing or moving to scratch it, you’ll just sit there with the intention until you make a conscious decision to do so. You’ll also find yourself becoming much less sensitive to sensations in the first place, which makes long periods of meditation much easier.

You might also notice that the thoughts you still have become much more like discrete full sentences than one long, rambling stream of consciousness. And finally, your breath will most likely get shallow enough that you no longer feel it at the rim of your nose (or wherever else you’ve been watching). Instead, you’ll just feel a general pleasant sensation of expansion and constriction, and your awareness will naturally spread to cover every part of the body that moves as you breathe. It’s during this period when, with enough practice, you’ll start to feel piti.