The best place to start is right where you are.
You don't have to be a Tibetan monk to meditate! You can be you with your experience, your family, your background, and your schedule. We created this Meditation 101 guide for anyone ready to deepen their meditation practice. If you’re just getting started or if you have questions about the science of meditation, you’ll find here time-tested tips, techniques, and tools that will infuse your practice with ease, joy, delight, and love.
Why Meditation Matters
Paraphrasing Lao Tzu, meditation helps us wait until our mud settles and the water becomes clear. We regain access to our expansive awareness.
If we have been feeling fear, rush, stress, confusion, doubt, anxiety, struggle, we come into direct contact with peace and clarity, with calm and quiet. We touch reality—that which is unborn in us and never dies. We remember playfulness, lightness of heart, joy, generosity, creativity, kindness. We allow ourselves to be our highest and best selves.
We improve the clarity and quality of our thinking, speaking, and action. We deepen our love and understanding in human relationships. We improve the quality and depth of sleep, relaxation, well-being and skillful daily action. We remember our highest purpose and live in joy and freedom. We remember that we are here to be kind, steady, helpful, and hopeful for ourselves and everyone else.
Meditation helps make visible the inspiration, peace, clarity and freedom that are already here in fullness. Our community teacher, Kashi, uses the color blue to explain how.
Ten Tips to Get You Started
We all have experienced events when our attention effortlessly drops away from thoughts and thinking: playing with a child, watching a gorgeous sunset, or enjoying amazing ice cream. Notice how good it feels when we spontaneously lose interest in whatever narrative is circulating in the mind. These peaceful experiences happen effortlessly without struggling to control the mind or trying to achieve a peaceful state. We are simply being in the moment without looking to the mind to interpret or label it, and the more we meditate, the more we cultivate these moments in our daily life. Here are ten meditation tips to help get you started.
Establish a routine
Meditating around the same time conditions your body and makes it easier to form a habit. It is much easier to establish a meditation routine if you commit to doing it at a specific time every day, preferably before your day gets started. Maybe you commit to meditating every day after you have your morning cup of coffee. Once the day has begun, it is too easy to get side-tracked.
Make sure you are comfortable
Set aside a special, welcoming space for your meditation--one that beckons you to spend time there. Include items that are of spiritual significance to you like prayer flags, photos of your meditation teacher, incense, or an altar. Make sure your meditation seat is comfortable. Bring in blankets to snuggle with when the weather is cool.
Whether sitting on the floor or a chair, just aim to keep your spine straight
Meditation works best when you can direct your breath and energy to travel straight up and down from the base of your spine to the center of your forehead.
Meditate with a friend
It helps to know you’re not meditating alone. Joining a meditation community like Awake Yoga Meditation can go a long way toward supporting a meditation practice. But you don't need to be in the same physical place to meditate with another person. You and a friend can agree to meditate at the same time together. Coming together in this way helps to keep us accountable and consistent.
Every little bit helps, no matter how small
If you meditate just 20 minutes daily, you will notice its positive effects. But even taking 10 minutes or five minutes or one minute—or one breath!—can invite more peace and focus into your life. Meditation is a practice, so frequency helps build the meditation muscle and strengthens the neural pathways.
Start each meditation by connecting with the earth
After you've closed your eyes, feel the earth's energy underneath your feet and allow it to ground you in slow, steady strength.
If (and when) your mind does wander, allow the thoughts to be clouds
Thoughts are bound to come up! Greet them, accept them, and imagine them as clouds moving slowly in the sky. Allow them to drift over you and once they're behind you, let them go. Repeat as often as you need.
Focus on your breath
As you meditate, keep bringing your attention back to your breath. This will help your mind to slow down and allow you to incorporate more of the positive effects of meditation.
Use a mantra while you meditate
Using a short mantra can deepen your practice and help you focus your attention. A powerful mantra we use at Awake Yoga Meditation is the Gayatri mantra, which has been used by yogis for thousands of years.
Let go of judging your meditation experience
Meditation is a practice that helps us quiet the mind and stay true to ourselves. There may be days where you are on fire, and days when you feel you are just going through the motions. Trust that the gifts of meditation will come if you continue your practice. And if you slip up with your practice, be kind to yourself. Just recommit to yourself and move forward.
Meditation Resources
3 Articles to Read First on The Bliss Blog
These articles can help optimize the mind prior to meditation.
3 Episodes to Listen to First on The AYM Podcast
These episodes can help optimize the mind prior to meditation.
“Love yourself into falling in love with the expansive clear awareness and sweet Life energy within you that meditation reveals, already present and always available.”