What comes to mind when you hear the word “meditation”? Do you think of bald monks in robes chanting and banging gongs? Or maybe you picture a skinny yogi in a diaper sitting cross-legged and holding his breath for hours. Or do you simply think, “that hippy stuff is just not for me.” Even if you haven’t yet embraced meditation as a wellness practice, your interest might have been piqued by the wave of popularity that meditation has been riding worldwide since the sixties. Fortunately for Late Bloomers, the practice of meditation has been sufficiently separated from its spiritual and religious origins to have become one of the most valuable and accessible wellness tools. Let’s investigate.
What is Meditation? The term “meditation” covers many activities, each relating in some respect to consciously observing and/or directing your mental activity. Creative humans have developed many different meditation techniques over the millennia, each with its own religious, developmental, transformational, or existential target. Despite their storied traditions or spiritual packaging, and notwithstanding some inevitable overlap, most meditation techniques generally fall into one of the following three categories.
- Concentration, in which the meditator focuses their attention on a particular activity or object, such as breathing, sounds, sensations, counting beads, or repeatedly chanting a word or phrase. The benefits of concentration meditation include a stronger ability to concentrate (duh) and greater awareness and control of our incessantly distracting thoughts – both of which are helpful to Late Bloomers seeking to increase their daily experience of joy and fulfillment.
- Manifestation, in which the meditator generates and maintains an intention to create or change something. Some believe that reality manifests from intention – that if our intentions are specific, strong, and repeatedly expressed, we can create our desired future. Manifestation meditation spans a range of techniques from the enthusiastic affirmations of Tony Robbins and Stuart Smalley to the Pali practice of Metta meditation, which seeks to manifest loving kindness within and among all living things.
- Mindfulness, in which the meditator practices witnessing the mind and all of its perceptions, interpretations, ponderings, emotional reactions, and illusions. Mindfulness meditation often incorporates elements from both concentration and manifestation techniques, but primarily aims at a deep and authentic experience of consciousness, which can lead to a greater appreciation of the nature and source of our cognitive burdens, such as regret, worry, fear, and anger, as well as our cognitive pleasures, such as joy and fulfillment.
More About Mindfulness. Jon Kabat Zinn, founder of a psychotherapeutic protocol called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), has defined mindfulness as “the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, in the service of self-understanding and wisdom.” On its face, that seems a fairly straightforward definition. When we parse it out, though, it can become a bit confusing. That’s because most of us instinctively understand that moments – including the present one – have no duration. Each moment is gone before you can capture it with your attention. And don’t get me started on the ambiguity inherent in the term “wisdom.” But, if the idea of wisdom is fatally subjective, and if paying attention to the present moment is temporally impossible, then how can we ever “do” mindfulness?
For our purposes, let’s think of mindfulness as intentionally paying attention to our present circumstances and the current flow of activities, both physical and mental. Implicit in that definition is our intention to (1) minimize our distractive thoughts (we can never wholly eliminate them), and (2) continually witness, accept, and gratefully surrender to that flow of activities, including all of our emotional reactions.
I realize that’s a mouthful. Read that proposed definition of mindfulness again, ponder it a bit, and then consider the following. We instinctively resist change, having learned over the many years of our evolutionary development that change often precedes trouble. Yet, life is nothing if not perpetual change. Ego loves the irony inherent in that situation and stands ready to aggravate the stress we experience as we live through the flow of changing moments. Once Ego transmutes that stress into an egoic fear loop of worry, regret, anger, resentment, jealousy, depression, anxiety, loneliness, embarrassment, or shame, Ego then can nudge us toward one of its many creative soothing strategies, including addictive or compulsive behaviors, social isolation, or lethargy. Our best weapon against Ego’s misguided interference is, first, becoming aware (i.e., mindful) of the nature of that unconscious reactivity and, second, gratefully accepting life as it is, rather than as we expect or wish it to be. As it turns out, the most effective tool to achieve that awareness and acceptance is mindfulness, which is best developed through regular meditation. (Bam.)
If practiced regularly, mindfulness meditation helps us see beyond our conscious and unconscious delusions. We bloom when we finally realize that we can lay down the burden of our illusory Self and contrived Ego, when we finally relinquish the false belief that we must protect ourselves from judgment or ridicule, and when we realize that we unnecessarily create or amplify most of our struggles in life. We bloom when we accept and gratefully surrender to our here and now or, perhaps more accurately, to the constant flow of our heres and nows.
Starting a Meditation Practice. To establish an effective mindfulness meditation practice, we first must employ exercises straight out of the concentration playbook. We must learn how to reduce our level of distraction and increase our ability to maintain our chosen focus of attention. In positive psychology, this is known as a “flow state” – being so absorbed in your actions that you lose your sense of passing time and your self-consciousness. Many of you have experienced a flow state in your lives, perhaps while dancing, cooking, skateboarding, or while immersed in a project at school or work. If so, you have also experienced an end to that flow state, which generally occurs when thoughts of self or the past or future impinge on your focus. This fluctuation between flow and distraction is inevitable. Humans cannot, and should not, maintain a flow state in perpetuity. After all, reflecting, planning, and pondering are all necessary mental activities that we should neither discourage nor fear. Neither, however, is it beneficial to remain forever “lost in thought,” sacrificing our awareness and appreciation of life in exchange for a perpetual state of regret, worry, or discontentment.
Try this. Here are some instructions for a short mindfulness meditation session. Plan on sitting for no more than 5 minutes, especially at first. As you become more comfortable with the process, feel free to lengthen your sessions to 10, 15, or even 20 minutes.
- Sit. Find a quiet spot where you won’t be disturbed for 5 minutes. The bathroom is fine, but I recommend a comfortable chair. Place your feet flat on the floor and your hands in your lap. Wiggle a bit, and then settle in. Try to keep your back relatively straight. Close you eyes or leave them slightly open and downcast – your choice.
- Cleansing Breaths. It helps to prepare the mind by taking 2 or 3 deep breaths, inhaling through the nose (assuming your nasal passages are sufficiently snot-free) and exhaling through the mouth.
- More Breathing. Watch yourself breathing. Try not to consciously intervene in the process. Just watch your breathing as it occurs naturally. Pay attention to each inhalation from beginning to end, then attend to the subsequent exhalation from beginning to end. Repeat that for the next 3 to 4 minutes. That’s it!
- When Your Mind Wanders. At some point during your meditation – likely at several points – thoughts will arise that capture your attention and pull it away from your breathing. When you notice that your mind has been seized by a thought, simply acknowledge the thought (if it helps, mentally say the word “thought”) and gently and non-judgmentally direct your attention back to your breathing.
- Ending Your Session. After 5 minutes, signaled by your timer or, if no timer, by the feeling that you’ve had enough, take one more deep breath and shout “hallelujah”! Okay, the shouting is optional, but I do recommend the final breath. You’re done!
There’s No Thinking in Mediation! With apologies to Tom Hanks, regardless of how skillful you become in your mindfulness practice, distracting thoughts will continue to arise. When you become aware that you’ve been absorbed in a thought stream and have “missed” your last few breaths, you have not made a mistake and you are not failing at your task. That experience is integral to a mindfulness practice. You are practicing your ability to notice how and when (and how often) thoughts distract us from attending to the flow of moments. So, each time you find yourself swimming in your sea of distracting thoughts, splash a bit and then step back on shore and keep breathing.
Did You Find This Article Helpful? Please let me know here whether you enjoyed this article and if you have suggestions or questions. And if you’d like to sign up for regular emails, click here. Also, if you want more specific instructions for a beginning meditation practice, please download your free tip sheet, “Starting a Meditation Practice.” And if you haven’t already done so, be sure to download, “A Morning Routine for Late Bloomers,” which gives you some helpful tips about habituating your bloom.
References and Suggested Readings:
- “Jon Kabat-Zinn Me Me Me” Mindful.org, 2015.
- Gunaratana, Henepola. Mindfulness in Plain English. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2002
- Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation In Everyday Life. New York: Hyperion, 1994.
- Nhất Hạnh, Thích. The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.