Here are 9 core skills and understanding for learning to meditate well.
Think of them as the foundations upon which to build a very special house…a flourishing human life.
1) Stoke the fire of motivation
Study Dharma or wisdom teachings, on the potential of the heart and mind. Get inspired. When we first enter into practice we might need to continuously stoke this fire and tend to it. But as confidence dawns through practice and experience — sooner or later a roaring inner fire of motivation is lit and we have become our own #1 teachers/leaders. At this stage, we have passed the point of no return.
2) Practice Deliberately
Consistent practice is essential to skills development. Especially, the rare and valuable skills that are required for lasting peace and wellness. Mind training is like any other form of training except the skills we develop are like meta-skills for being a good human being and filter down to every aspect of our lives — if we are training correctly we fall in love with practice, and life as a whole.
3) Mindfulness is the optimal interaction between attention and awareness.
Stabilizing our attention is key to meditative development. But it helps to understand why this is so, what’s the point so that we can build our toolkit of techniques that enable us to do so.
Learning to direct and sustain our attention (say, for example, on the sensations of breathing) requires that we simultaneously develop powerful peripheral awareness. Developing powerful peripheral awareness, in turn, stabilizes our attention because we become aware of potential distractions (and dullness) before they replace the breath as our primary focus of attention, which very easily can lead to forgetting that we are supposed to be meditating and mind wandering.
We learn to become more introspectively aware, knowing what’s happening in the mind as we attend to the breath.
This makes us more skillful meditators and makes us more likely to become the kind of meditators that experience insight and awakening.
4) Embodied Mindfulness
Why develop embodied mindfulness?
- The felt sense of the body serves as a kind of Somatic Anchor, for an open-minded, broad, and receptive presence of mind in practice and in life.
- It helps with the development of mindfulness by raising the overall conscious power of the mind.
- Practices through the body, enable access to a subtle joy of embodied presence throughout the day.
- Recent, studies have shown our interceptive access is key to emotional processing (such as anxiety and depression).
5) Become a healing, loving environment for feelings to process themselves.
We do this by developing a stable core of awareness, safety, and compassion. Learning to be present to our feelings rather than reject or deny them. Bringing compassionate presence to our feelings requires mindfulness and care-filled deliberate practice. It also primes us for liberating insight and re-shaped the way our emotions are constructed so that we begin to experience them in new ways and relate to the emotions of others in new ways too.
Additionally, it connects us to the source of loving qualities within underlying awareness itself (Buddhists would say the deep nature of mind or Buddha Nature).
6) Liberating the mind through Joy
Create balance in the mind by inclining the mind towards wholesome states…
…and ultimately abiding in love.
Happiness originates in the mind. Therefore, a direct path to happiness is to engage in wholesome practices and actions. The mind becomes joyful as a result. This is a counterbalance to the negative, selfish, survival mode bias that our minds are conditioned with.
So to promote joy, happiness, and liberation we must expose the mind to what is wholesome. That is to base our lives on virtue and establishing virtue. Celebrating the success, good fortune, and virtues of others primes the mind for Joy (of the quality of love at delights!). It goes against the grain of our usual self-centeredness — the root of our mental afflictions and problems.
The practice of gratitude is a powerful practice to do as a support for the mind training process.
7) Move towards a vision of human flourishing and connection
To fly on the path of mental development, everything matters and is up for consideration.
What really counts is our commitment to a vision of human flourishing (and planetary flourishing!).
The practice of virtue primes the mind for experiencing a wholesome state — a direct path to happiness and liberation. The practice of love, becoming compassionate, forgiving, allowing and understanding presence trumps all the shiny “techniques and science” for training the mind and experiencing the real fruits of the practice. Which is flourishing for all.
8) The Slow way is the fast way
Our approach to learning to meditate must be slow and progressive. As working slow is smooth for our cognitive-emotional systems… and smooth development is effective and efficient development. Therefore, the slow way is the fast way!
To reap the full spectrum of benefits and potential that meditation can offer us as a well-being practice and a path to happiness and mental freedom requires that we build on solid foundations. This is an art that, at times, requires a little technical understanding and pointing in the right direction in the form of guidance from wise friends, teachers, and teachings.
9) Learn to cultivate
There are lots to consider when getting started with meditation or if you feel that your meditation has reached a plateau.
One thing to remember is that it is a Well-being practice. And a potentially profound Well-being practice…with the ultimate trajectory of practice pointing us toward abiding in a state of unconditional well-being.
To get there we must learn to cultivate. To plant the seeds of wisdom and compassionate understanding and provide the space and fertile grounds for them to bloom.