Meditation 101: 1 Book, 1 App, and Listening to Myself Breathe

I have a friend who has been talking to me about meditation for several years now. He’s a practicing Buddhist, and leads a meditation session every week at a local Buddhist center. I have attended several times, though not regularly enough to have seen any benefits from the practice of meditation. He leads a meditation service that is also a religious service, and I have sometimes felt awkward, not really knowing how fully to participate. I’ve felt that there could be some benefit to regular meditation, but I don’t know how, or whether, to participate during the prayers which are offered before and after each twenty minute meditation period. I also know myself well enough to realize that I don’t have the fortitude to press ahead with the practice of meditation alone, without some kind of direction.

That has been the state of things for several years. I might attend a meditation service three or four times a year, and come away with the same questions and hesitations about the practice, at the same time seeing that it could be a very fruitful, centering experience.

A couple of weeks ago, my therapist suggested that I engage in some meditation, not necessarily as a religious experience but as a way to help center myself. She recommended an iPhone app that she has found helpful, called “Stop, Breathe & Think”. It guides the novice through some meditation experiences, and over the last couple of weeks I’ve meditated most days. Some days I find my monkey mind slows down enough to get something out of it, but many days I spend most of my time drawing my awareness back under control after it has wandered.

In the introductory chapters of Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, authors Mark Williams and Danny Penman talk about the virtues and benefits of secular meditation, and they make quite a case. They also are very creative in presenting meditation in a fun, unique way. In the introductory chapters, we are exposed to the “1-Minute Meditation” as a simple way to expose ourselves to the fundamentals of meditation, and also to the “Chocolate Meditation”, which applies mindfulness and attentiveness to something that we all can enjoy.

In Chapter 5, “Mindfulness Week One: Waking Up to the Autopilot”, we hear of some of the reasoning behind simple meditations that focus on the breath. Spending ten minutes, or twenty, or thirty, attending to our own breathing can feel like a colossal waste of time, but Williams and Penman present several things we can learn from concentrating on our own breath.

An idea that I found especially interesting was “the breath does not need us to make it happen. “…tuning into the breath can be an important antidote to the natural tendency toward believing that we have to be in control.”

Another fascinating idea is that the breath “grounds you in the here and now. You cannot take a breath for five minutes ago, or for five minutes’ time. You can only take a breath for now.”

Those are two good ideas for me to have in mind during my next meditation.