How to Begin Meditating – Suggested First Meditation Practice

Meditation practice typically begins with some form of concentration practice to develop focused attention, or “one-pointedness.”

For a simple concentration practice, place your awareness on one thing, such as:

1. Something outside – candle flame, a mandala, a sound, a mantra

2. Something inside – mental image, mental mantra, sensation of breath

And then attempt to keep the awareness on that one thing.

The “failure” comes very quickly. In beginning practice, the mind leaves the selected object and begins wandering almost immediately. By the time you wake up and realize your awareness has left the object, you are deep into the story of some future or past thought, perhaps rehashing an old conversation or making the list of things to do for the week.

The practice, then, is to bring the awareness back to the selected object as soon as you wake up in some other thought.

The teaching is then found in repeating the practice in the face of the continuing “failure.” We begin to feel and experience how strong the mind is, how insistent it is on wandering away, and how little control we have over it even when we purposely try to keep it focused on one simple object!

But even with this realization of how little control we have over the mind, there is an even deeper teaching. Catching yourself in a thought, and intentionally coming back to the focus of attention causes a first separation between “yourself” and “your thoughts.” In that catching and coming back, you have the experience of witnessing the thought rather than being trapped in the narrative of the thought. As that witness, you are outside the thought and able to move your awareness from that thought back to the object of concentration. And you have the direct immediate experience of meditation as one teacher defines it: “the experience of yourself as other than your thoughts.” You have then grown in your practice – you are bigger than your thoughts!

In a future post we’ll look more closely at the teaching we receive about the nature of our mind and thought as we begin working the Eleventh Step with a concentration practice.

Wishing you all the best in recovery,

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