Things That Would Have Been Helpful To Know When I Began a Meditation Practice

Meditation is a spiritual practice that I was informally introduced to in my youth. A few of my teachers in Catholic school encouraged me to practice “quiet prayer” as they called it. Later, in college, I read some books about meditation and tried to figure it out on my own. I already practiced meditation regularly by the time I took my first class in meditation in 1979.

Recently, a woman who sees me for spiritual direction was very exasperated in her attempts to incorporate meditation in her life. We begin each meeting with about ten minutes in silence. In our last meeting, after the silence, she was a bit agitated. “I don’t know how you do it,” she said. “You just take a deep breath, close your eyes, and you’re gone. You’re just out of here! Actually, I can feel you very present in the silence but yet you’re somewhere else. It’s just weird! How do you do it?”

Teasing her a bit, I responded: “Well, I don’t pay attention to what anyone else is doing when I meditate. But seriously, it’s about practice and learning to make the method of meditation your own.”

She looked at me a bit more seriously. “You know what you’re doing today. But do you remember what it was like to start? What did you want to know when you started? What would have been helpful for you?”

Given how I began a practice of meditation, having an experienced teacher would have helped. A spiritual director or some other form of spiritual teacher would have been a great benefit. As I thought more about it, I realized that there were some things that I wish I had known when I started. Looking back, here are some of the things that have occurred to me about starting to meditate.

First, no one told me that it was difficult to learn to sit still. I generally don’t have trouble with sitting for meditation today, but sometimes I do. If I’ve not been regular with my practice or if I am stressed about life, it can be torture to just sit and focus my mind. When it’s really difficult, I intently use a prayer word or mantra. Sometimes I also use prayer beads. While sitting still is pretty easy for me most days, in the beginning it was a challenge. I think the only thing anyone can do is accept the fact that on some days it’s difficult to sit in silence and maintain focus. Don’t expect it to be easy. When it is, that’s great. When it’s a challenge to be still, accept that as a normal part of the process. No matter your level of focus, just do what you can to complete the time you’ve set for meditation. As many meditation teachers are fond of saying, “That’s why it’s called practice.”

The second thing I wish someone would have told me was that the method of meditation is both important and non-essential. When I began, I had several recommendations about what to do. As I started reading about meditation and its various forms, each book was different. There was the prayer of heart, the Jesus prayer, transcendental meditation (it was the 70’s after all), centering prayer, and contemplation – to name a few. My experience with Buddhism came much later, first with Zen, then mindfulness, and most recently compassion meditation. A method is great to help guide and enable you to build a practice. But it’s like learning to use any tool or playing a musical instrument: the method needs to become part of you. Eventually “the method” falls away and you simply learn to meditate. Remember: a pianist doesn’t focus on whether her fingers are on the right keys. Instead, when she plays, the piano the music becomes part of her. She looks at the notes and plays them. All the piano lessons fade away in the background and she simply becomes one with the music. Similarly, don’t get so caught up in the method and doing it exactly right that you never actually meditate.

Related to this is the third thing I wish I knew at the beginning: the right amount of time to spend. I honestly thought to do it right, I had to sit in silence a long time. A half hour was okay. An hour was better. I thought I’d failed if I couldn’t maintain an hour. Guess what? I really couldn’t do an hour of meditation! I felt guilty about it a lot. Here’s an important thing to know: research on meditation has shown that a person benefits from a meditation practice with as little as 12 minutes spent in meditation a few times each week. In other words, if time is tight, try to do 10 to 15 minutes in meditation. If you do that three or four times each week, you’re starting to build a solid practice.

The fourth thing that’s important is know is what meditation isn’t. Because of my background, I initially understood meditation as a form of prayer. From a Christian perspective, that’s true because the focus of Christian meditation is to be present to God within us. But the key to meditation is really the mental focus. Many people today confuse meditation with relaxation. There are also lots of recorded “guided meditations” that are really progressive relaxation exercises and not meditation. If you’re actually meditating, your body may be relaxed but your mind is concentrating on the subject of your meditation: a word, an image, your breath, or something like that. With proper mental focus, all the other distractions fade in the background. It’s just you and the object of your mental focus.

The last thing I wish someone had told me when I began was that a regular time and place for meditation helps a great deal. When I started, I thought it was always best to go to a church. At that time, churches were often left unlocked, so anyone could walk in and pray. That’s generally not true today. Your regular time and place doesn’t have to be a holy space or prayer corner, though that can be helpful. It can be anywhere. If the best time and place you have for ten minutes of meditation is in the bathroom after dinner so that your spouse and kids won’t bother you, then go to the bathroom. ( I’ve known people with families who find that the bathroom is the only place no one bothers them.) By having a regular time and place for meditation, it becomes part of your daily routine. If it’s a regular part of your routine, you’ll miss it immediately when don’t meditate.

When I remember what it was like for me to learn meditation, I realize that it was pretty easy for me to understand the steps to methods outlined in various books. What was difficult were some of the practical aspects of actually meditating. When I teach meditation as a class, it’s the practical things people most often ask about. If you’re starting a practice in meditation perhaps some of these things will be helpful for you to make the practice of meditation your own.