Meditation 101: How to Get Started
Five practical tips to help you succeed.
Ten years ago, I hadn’t meditated for a minute in my life.
Sure, I’d had a mindful moment or two, like any of us. Moments of presence in which I was paying full attention to my experience and not ruminating on the past or fantasizing about the future. In those moments I felt at peace, but they were few and far between. Crucially, I didn’t know how to get more of them.
Back then, my mind had two standard modes of existence. Either it replayed embarrassing and shameful moments from my past or anxiously and fearfully anticipated the future. As you probably know from experience, this kind of thinking sucks.
But I didn’t know that life could be any different than it was. I only knew what I knew.
I’m not sure what made me pick up a book about how to meditate. The concept of meditation had always felt so foreign to me. What was the point? What did it do? How did it help? That day, these questions converged in my mind in a way that piqued my curiosity.
After I bought that book, it took me another 8 years before I began to meditate daily. It’s been a long and bumpy road getting from there to here, but worth it. Perhaps, worth as much as anything I’ve ever done.
