What is it? Why do I want it? How do I get it?
What Is Meditation?
There is a huge world of meditation out there, and a lot of it is fuzzy. For instance, if you search on YouTube, you will find many guided visualisations: soft lighting, a sultry voice, soft focus. Some of it is lovely. But these aren’t meditations. They are adult bedtime stories.
I teach the modern version of practices that go back around three thousand years. Stripped of the mystique. Here is my definition:
Meditation is mental training that helps you learn how to become familiar and comfortable with your mind.
Meditation isn’t emptying your mind, floating away into a dreamy happy thought. Becoming familiar with your mind and then becoming comfortable with it.
Why Meditate?
Because you want to get your mind on your side.
Think about it this way. If your mind spent all day cheering you on, encouraging you, pointing out what was going well, you would never want it to be quiet. You would want more of it.
But that is not where the modern mind tends to go. Left alone, the mind switches into what researchers call ‘default mode’. Examples of default mode are rumination, where your mind goes over the past, where it worries about the future. The inner critic and even the external critic. The voice that has decided that nothing and no-one is good enough. We all know someone who spends their life complaining.
Getting your mind on your side means the default mode weakens and you learn to break into it to plan constructively and make the changes you need in your life.
How Do You Get It?
Here you have two choices if you want to learn to meditate.
The first choice is to get up thirty minutes earlier every morning, sit on a cushion, and meditate. That is completely valid, and meditators have done it for thousands of years. But none of those people lived in a world of overwhelm and constant accelerated change.
Life is different now and we need to learn how to change the way we practise to fit in with our lives.
The Frictionless Way
The second path is the one I teach. Instead of adding meditation as yet another task on your infinitely growing task list, you integrate it into the life you already have.
The Frictionless Way consists of five key practices and fifteen to twenty optional ones. Many of these practices cost you nothing at all: no extra time, no changes to your schedule and no rearranging your life.
Keep Walking
Everybody walks.
While you walk you can choose to either meditate or ruminate.
Think of a regular walk that you do. The walk to the station, the shops, the dog. Set a reminder on your phone that goes off five minutes before that walk starts reminding you to do a walking meditation or mindful walk.
If you don’t know how to do walking meditation, check out my walking meditation podcast episode. Put your headphones on, start the episode, and do the walk you would have done anyway.
Listen to the Guided Mindful Walk (podcast episode, about 25 minutes)
Not a single minute added to your day.
The Frictionless Way in a Nutshell
Meditation is becoming familiar and comfortable with your own mind.
You want to be familiar and comfortable with your mind so you can get your mind on your side.
The best and easiest and most sustainable way to meditate is to integrate it into the life you already have, starting with a walk you were going to take anyway.
Meditate with us live, four times a week
The Meditation Course runs live guided classes on Zoom every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, with a growing library of courses. Membership gives you all of it.
