MGD’s

“Life is nothing more than a stream of experiences – the more widely and deeply you swim in it, the richer your life will be.” – Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi

This quick primer makes the case for why you should integrate meditation into your life as a daily practice. It then goes on to provide a quick beginner’s overview of the practice itself.  

So why meditate? “The basic logic is quite simple: the quality of your mind determines the quality of your life.  Happiness and suffering, no matter how extreme, are mental events.  The mind depends upon the body, of course, and the body upon the world. But everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter.” – Sam Harris, Waking Up. Your mind is all you have. And the practice of meditating is aimed at improving the quality of your mind by examining and then improving your thought patterns in several important ways.  It does this through a series of exercises that help you gain a better understanding of the mechanics of the mind.  I have read several books and spent considerable time on various meditation apps but the best of what I have learned on the topic has come from using Sam Harris’ “Waking Up” book (and app) so you will see that I refer to him and his app throughout this primer.  

So what are some of these key benefits meditation has to offer? Here are a few of the big ones:

1. Improved Emotional Resilience and Well Being: Life tests us all from time to time. Navigating its inevitable ups and downs requires emotional resilience. Meditation helps you develop this emotional resilience by teaching you to decrease reactivity and create space between you and your more automatic emotional responses. It teaches us to carefully observe our thoughts and sensations that accompany the emotions we experience.  With this increased awareness of thought patterns, we can learn to more readily recognize, and then let go of, negative thoughts and emotions when they appear.  In Sam Harris speak, we can learn to “get off the ride” instead of letting whatever emotion we feel in any given moment dictate our state of mind until it runs out of gas.  With regular practice, one can learn to navigate life’s inevitable fluctuations with a greater degree of grace, poise and self-control and reduce the duration of negative emotions.  As Sam says, the difference between staying angry for one hour vs. several hours cannot be overstated.  How much of your life could you get back by merely reducing the duration of the negative emotions you experience? [ look for this quote]

2. Improved Concentration and Focus: “There is a multi-front war being fought for our attention, and most of us are losing.” (Sam Harris, Waking Up app). Certain meditation practices are designed to train the mind to anchor its attention on a single point of focus (as is done with many of the common practices like observing the breath or other sensations). Over time, individuals can improve their ability to concentrate.  With this ability comes increased productivity and overall cognitive performance.  It has been shown in studies that those who regularly meditate have beneficial changes to the area of the brain responsible for focus and attention.  If you can cultivate these benefits, you will have developed a significant advantage over the vast majority of people who are constantly lost in thought or drowning in a sea of distractions (and cease to be one of them).  

3. Teaches You to Be More Fully Present: Meditation practice is centered around grounding our attention in the present moment, rather than getting lost in rumination about the past or worries about the future. By training ourselves repeatedly to bring our focus back to our immediate experience, meditation leads to an increased ability to immerse ourselves in the here and now, filling our lives with a sense of deeper awe and appreciation. Whether it’s the taste of food, the feeling of sunshine on our skin, the sounds of nature, or a conversation with your child, we learn to be more fully present, appreciating the beauty and intricacy of life’s small details by paying close attention to what is arising in our conscious minds at this very second.  This level of awareness, when applied more consistently moment to moment, enriches our interpersonal relationships, our experiences, our work, and our overall quality of life.  

4. Stress Reduction: Meditation has been shown to reduce stress.  I put it down here at #4 because it is often the first and only benefit discussed but I have learned that meditation is so much more than that (and would be well worth the effort even if it did not reduce stress). However, it is a noteworthy benefit nonetheless as stress is increasingly taking a toll on our collective mental and physical health. The time you actually spend meditating can provide a temporary sanctuary from the chaos, offering a few sacred minutes each day to step out of the flow of constant activity and distracted thought. But also, by practicing mindfulness, individuals learn to observe stressors without reacting to or becoming entangled in them, which can help to reduce the intensity of the difficult moments we experience every day.

Increasing emotional resilience, decreasing reactivity, learning to fully inhabit the present, enhancing our ability to focus, reducing stress. These are superpowers in this day and age. Your mind is all you have. Taking time to sharpen the saw with a little daily tune-up will pays dividends many times over.  

One additional point worth emphasizing is that meditation is a genuine skill that does require some actual training.  Sam Harris notes in his introductory course that, “you will not learn to meditate by accident.”   As I mentioned above, I have spent time on several meditation apps (Calm, Headspace, etc.) over the past few years and read multiple books on the topic but the practice only really clicked for me after taking Sam Harris’s introductory course in his “Waking Up” app, so that is where I suggest you start.  His explanations of the “why” behind the practice and the specific tactics you explore throughout the course are head and shoulders above anything else I have come across in terms of practical guidance.  Once you have taken his course and have that foundation, you will be well equipped to take your practice in any direction you choose (e.g. explore other apps or meditation modalities) but with a better understanding of what the point of meditating is in the first place.

PART 2: Overview of the Practice

Below is a quick overview of what a daily meditation practice looks like in terms of what you will actually be doing in these sessions.  In his introductory course, Sam Harris presents the practice of meditation in stages (which is similar to approaches taken in other apps, though they tend to be less explicit), each level emphasizing a particular skill.  The following is an outline of the basic progression from Harris’s intro course. It’s important to note that his approach is nuanced and adaptable.  It emphasizes personal exploration and understanding over strict adherence to stages. But in general, the progression looks something like this:

1. Stage 1: Mindfulness of Breathing: This is a common starting point for beginners in several meditation apps.  The objective with this simple practice is to develop concentration and present-moment awareness.  You will be asked to focus on the sensation of breathing. Notice the details of the breath, such as rhythm and how it feels in different parts of the body. When you notice your mind has wandered, you will gently return your focus to the breath.  This stage aims to calm the mind and reduce distraction, serving as a foundation for deeper observation and insight. This is also training  of the “attention muscle”, increasing your mind’s ability to catch itself when it is lost in thought, and to return to a specific point of focus.
2. Stage 2: Mindfulness of Sensations and Thoughts: After you have spent some time following the breath, you are then asked to expand awareness beyond the breath to include all bodily sensations and the flow of your thoughts.  You will begin to observe sensations throughout the body, noticing any discomfort, pressure, tension, or sensations (pleasant or unpleasant) without trying to change them. Similarly, you will observe thoughts as they arise, treating them as objects of awareness without getting caught up in their content (this takes practice!).  This stage cultivates an understanding of the impermanent nature of thoughts and sensations.  That is, we take time to appreciate the key insight that every thought or sensation we have had or will ever have, by its very nature, simply arises and then falls away.  This practice fosters a non-reactive mind that can merely witness these thoughts and sensations appearing in consciousness without responding to them.
3. Stage 3: Open Awareness or Choiceless Awareness:  Here, the idea is to develop the expanded ability to remain aware of the entire field of experience, without focusing on any particular object.  Allow all experiences (sensations, sounds, thoughts, emotions) to arise and pass without preference or aversion. The meditator learns to observe both the ever-changing nature of the contents of consciousness, as well as the unchanging nature of consciousness itself, leading to a more profound sense of interconnectedness and equanimity.  An analogy Sam Harris uses in his course is that of a mirror, where the content that the mirror reflects (analogous to our thoughts, sensations, impressions arising in each moment) is constantly changing based on what passes in front of it, but the mirror itself (i.e. the base layer of consciousness in which everything arises) remains unchanged.
4. Stage 4: Insight Meditation: Finally, you will seek to gain direct insight into the nature of mind and reality. This involves a deeper investigation into the nature of thoughts, emotions, and sensations themselves, recognizing their transient and “empty” qualities. The goal is to see through the illusion of a permanent, unchanging self and to experience a liberating understanding of reality[, leading to a decrease in suffering].
5. Special Topics: Outside of this progression, Sam also intersperses special sessions on forgiveness, gratitude, appreciation and compassion. These are some of my favorite sessions in the app and introduce other modalities of meditative practice that complement the practices above.  

All of the techniques above can be beneficial at different times.  There is no need to get too caught up in the order and whether I accurately captured the progression. You should explore these various practices to find what works best for you. The ultimate goal is to cultivate a mind that is clear, open, and compassionate, capable of navigating life with greater wisdom and ease.  

Give it a shot.  You have nothing to lose and everything to gain from integrating this practice into your life.