Foundations of Meditation

• A step-by-step guide to the Foundational Meditation for Mental Health
  • 1.  Make sure you are comfortable enough to not move for the duration of the exercise 
  • 2.  Pick a “Focal Point” using one of your five sense. I recommend starting with touch and waiting to use sight until you are more advanced.
    • Ideas:
      • Try pressing your finger tips together or
      • Put a beverage in your mouth and don’t swallow it
  • 3.  Set a timer for 30 seconds.
  • 4. Close your eyes and work to notice “what comes up”. (I.e. what thoughts enter your mind, what sensations you feel in your body, and what emotional feelings you notice internally). Once you notice something return to the focal point you’ve selected. 
  • 5. You stop when the timer stops.
  • Do this once a day for a month. After a month you can gradually increase to up to two minutes (or longer), though I have found 30 seconds a day can be enough for someone to see significant gains.
  • The only time we’d want you breaking the meditation is if you are in danger (i.e. a fire alarm goes off etc), otherwise, it is your job to notice whatever urges arise without acting on them, including urges to move your body, end the meditation, think through something – etc.
  • You will drift away many times; this is the whole point of the exercise.  You are working on increasing your ability to notice when you drift away and come back to your chosen focal point
  • This is not meant to be relaxing, it is a very active process of observing your mind body. What you are doing with this exercise is strengthening your ability to have an internal experience that you don’t react to
  • It’s ok if you get irritated, want to stop, find yourself feeling tempted to move, wonder if you’re doing it “right”. These are all just thoughts, feelings, senses, and urges and it is your job to notice them without acting on them.

Regardless of whether or not you have a meditation practice already, I always encourage my clients to start with this foundational exercise. When we meditate in this way we strengthen our ability to cope by working on being present with our thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations.  We are noticing them, but not letting them dictate our actions or behavior.

When I introduce this skill to my clients I introduce it to empower someone to strengthen their ability to improve their concentration and to be less controlled by their emotional states. I also use it to help them increase their ability to control their attention, which makes them less susceptible to triggers.

The goal is to work on being present with what comes up, to notice it, and then to let it go and be present for the next “thing” (be it a thought, sensation, or feeling). 

Many of my clients get stuck in one of two places, so be on the lookout for these traps:

1. They start “Chaining”, meaning they have a thought and then they react to that thought with another thought, or maybe a feeling, and so on and so forth so the meditation exercise becomes more like a stream of consciousness. This is normally how our minds work, so it will probably start to happen during the exercise. It’s ok, you’re going to get better at catching that and then redirecting yourself. Instead work towards noticing a thought, and then letting it float away while waiting for the next one. 
2. The other common trap is: “Blocking”. This is when you try and “clear your mind” so that you have quiet or stillness. While that can be a great centering or relaxation exercise, it is not the type of meditative exercise we are trying to work towards. We want thoughts, feelings, and sensations to float into awareness so you can strengthen your ability to notice them and then re-direct your attention.

The skill with meditation is not in preventing your mind from wandering, it is in noticing when it wanders and then bringing it back to your chosen focal point. 

 You should find, after a month, you are less “reactive” and more able to notice your thoughts and feelings without having the urgency to respond to them. 

Notes:

1. The focal point can be anything that uses one of your five sense. I personally find touch is the most accessible, but here are examples from all five senses. The key with any of these is to use it as an anchor, something you return to in-between the internal thoughts, feelings, and sensations you notice throughout the exercise.
   1. Taste: Put a candy in your mouth and notice the taste of it. Resist the temptation to move it around / crunch on it.
   2. Sound: Just listen to the sounds around you – this works best if you’re not in a completely quiet space, though if it is “quiet” you may find there were more sounds than you had been aware of when you quietly listen.
   3. Sight: Watch trees in the wind, watch snow or rain fall.
   4. Smell: Sit over a coffee or tea, spray a perfume or cologne.
2. With step one, I encourage you to sit in a way in which you are comfortable, BUT as you get more and more advanced you might want to try sitting in a way this is slightly uncomfortable. This will give you an opportunity to work on sitting with your physical discomfort and tolerating the sensation of it.
3. There will be a second post to come covering how to move away from having a focal point. As you get more and more advanced your focal point can get less specific, but phase one meditation is about working on noticing the drift and re-centering back to the established focal point. Eventually just “you” can be your focal point. 
4. If “nothing” happens (i.e. you try this exercise every day for a week and you just have a blank mind) you can try scanning around your body to see what you notice or prompting yourself with questions about what’s happening in different areas of your body).
5. If this is highly activating (which it might be if you struggle with anxiety, intense feelings, or you have a history of trauma) start with grounding and try decreasing the time to 15 or 20 seconds. Once you get really good at grounding you are likely to feel safer and more able to tolerate the exercise.
6. Want to learn more about who may benefit from meditation? The post “Why Meditation” covers more details on how meditation can increase our ability to cope. The post “Controlling our Attention” covers how meditation can increase out ability to accept what we cannot control. Meditation can help us increase our ability to release our emotions, as covered in the post “Emotions are Brief“.
7. I was trained on this in graduate school, and I remember we would start off every class with a two minute exercise. Inevitably someone would arrive late and shuffle around the room, drop a bag, pull out a chair, etc. I remember feeling and thinking “ugh! They’ve disrupted the peace! It’s interfering with the exercise”. Initially, I was not able to step back and recognize that my irritation at being “interrupted” and my thoughts about that were actually just another thought and feeling to notice. The exercise can’t be interrupted, because the whole purpose of it is to notice what comes up (internally or externally), and then come back to your chosen focal point. That noticing can include noticing your own irritability, like in my case, as well as noticing your own experience of distraction. The better we get at noticing and returning our attention to our chosen focal point in the exercise, the better we get with this skill in our day to day lives. 
8. Over time, this exercise will teach you to be more mindful of your internal world and less reactive to it, which means (eventually) you may not need to do it on an ongoing basis. Instead, may find you are more and more used to being connected with your internal world, and this awareness without reactivity will happen more organically and naturally throughout your day.
9. You may notice there is a focus on “not reacting” or “acting” in this exercise. That’s because we are working to introduce intention to when you act on internal experiences. The goal in life is, of course, to act and respond as is indicated for any given situation, and meditation of this nature helps introduce a pause so that you can increase your ability to notice your internal experiences before reacting to them. In life you won’t always just sit and notice, but that’s exactly what we do when we meditate – we strengthen our ability to resist the urge to act. There will, in life, be times where acting intuitively / quickly  makes sense (think about emergency situations), so we are not eliminating the ability or need (at times) for a quick reaction – but we are working to introduce intentionality so we can be more in control of when we act quickly.
10. Chelsea Handler’s book, “Life will be the death of me” covers how meditation fundamentally changed her life.
11. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Wherever you go there you are” is an excellent instructional book on meditation.