How to mindfully meditate

Let's talk about how to meditate, mindfully, and why this is different from wellness meditation.

My first workplace hired a meditation coach to host a weekly in-house meditation seminar. The guy looked exactly like what you’d expect: long hair, hemp clothes, lots of necklaces. His name was Kieran or Atlas or something. He sat us in a circle, and we breathed, verbalized some oms, and repeated affirmations. The exercises were postured as a means of resting the mind, and they were, personally, not so bad at that. I felt more loving and peaceful (at least during that hour within which I suspended all thought of real life). I call this flavor of meditation wellness meditation, and the most popular meditation apps tend to teach meditation in this way.

But eventually, I dropped the practice in favor of exercise, socialization, writing — behaviors that felt equally effective but more rewarding. The value just wasn’t enough to warrant the time spent, particularly when I felt the benefits could be achieved through more productive means. And I count myself one of the lucky ones — a lot of folks have more infuriating experiences. I recently read “What the Bones Know”, and in it, Stephanie Foo¹ articulates a sentiment that a lot of folks end up having:

“Meditation does not bring me peace. I’ve tried it maybe a dozen times before, and it always goes the same way: I try to clear my head. I close my eyes and try to think about nothing. I want to make my brain a blank slate, but images keep popping up: an idea for a story I should follow up on, the laundry I haven’t done, the shoes I should take to a cobbler.”

And so I filed meditation away in my mind under “natural low-grade Prozac that works for some people” and promptly moved on with my life.

Years later, though, I discovered mindfulness meditation². And while this flavor of meditation kind of feels the same — you sit calmly, relax the eyes, notice the breath — I came to realize that it was fundamentally different, in a way. The initial objective felt orthogonal to the wellness path³: rather than trying to directly achieve calm through dissociation, the goal of mindfulness meditation was… well, just that — to simply to be mindful. To notice what’s happening, whether that’s the calm cadence of your breath or the intrusive thoughts that are getting in the way.

And this subtle shift in the objective is powerful. While being calm is an effect, being mindful is a state of mind. With mindfulness practice, you aren’t simply trying to force an outcome (though such outcomes will inevitably happen). Rather, you’re altering your relationship with reality. Mindfulness is a means of become aware of what your brain is doing, rather than a means of simply mediating its outputs. And, as a consequence, the effects are far more profound than its physiological benefits.

I’ve written about this before, so I won’t expound the virtues of mindfulness meditation. But in short, you become more aware of everything, and in doing so, you incidentally become aware of the precise flavor of things that are motivating you or stressing you out — their precursors, their signatures. And so you develop this space away from your feelings and thoughts that not only helps you react more conscientiously, but more than that, provides comprehension of those things that would otherwise be impossible.

That said, one of the chief problems in getting started with mindfulness is that it’s not trivial to get started, particularly when every meditation app claims to be a mindfulness app. It’s easy to spend hours going down the mindfulness path when, in reality, you weren’t practicing mindfulness at all — you were just repeatedly getting overwhelmed by all the chatter in your brain.

So, that’s what this post is about. This’ll be my quick attempt at providing an explanation on the core principles of mindfulness that, once internalized, I hope can help you start mindfully meditating yourself.

How to meditate

The overarching goal of mindfulness meditation is to notice what you notice, NOT to achieve a state of perfect calm⁴. The practice is this:

1. Notice something.

   Usually the breath, but sounds, sensations, feelings also work well. Notice this as long as you can.

2. Notice the thing that distracts you from that first thing.

3. Go back to #1.

And that’s it. The process is one of focusing on a thing, then noticing distractions. Unlike wellness meditation, in mindfulness meditation, your initial point of focus is not necessarily the end goal but more of a zero-ing mechanism — a means of going back to a blank slate so you can more clearly observe what’s trying to come distract you.

For me, these distractions typically come from one of three sources: thoughts, feelings, or songs that I get stuck in my head (really specific, I know). Sometimes you’ll start reflexively planning the rest of your day (thinking). Other times, you’ll feel heavy, exhausted, and it’ll compel you to scroll on Youtube (feeling). Sometimes you might even get frustrated by the fact that you’re not able to focus on your breath (thinking). The catch is this: these are all the things to notice, and so are part of the practice. And by noticing them, you not only rob them of a lot of their power, but you give yourself a laboratory to observe and study them.

I'm focusing here more heavily on distractions because I’ve found that distractions tend to be commonly misunderstood. Distractions don’t distract you from practice — noticing distraction is the practice. Almost everything that will happen during your meditation practice falls into the realm of distractions. And once you realize this, you’ll realize there’s no sense of doing it right — it’s just about noticing all those things, from your random thoughts to your anxiety to the feeling that the presence of these distractions must mean you’re doing terribly. Nothing escapes scrutiny.

Adyashanti has a great quote that I believe captures this distinction well:

"Being in the moment, it's not like you have to find a special place to show up. The problem isn't that people can't find the moment -- I think the problem that most people have is that they can't get out of the moment. I think if most people were honest, they would say 'well, I'm actually trying to get out of the moment, but I'm hoping that when I get into the moment, the moment will be different than this'."

Why this is better

Perhaps “better” is a strong word. I’ll share a bit on why this manner of meditation is preferable to me. I talk a lot about thinking. That’s the principal subject matter of this newsletter, after all. And if you’ve been reading, mindfulness is often the solution to most of the cognitive traps that I try to untangle in my posts.

And this is not a coincidence. Most of the chaotic things that your brain does are a result of not noticing what your brain is doing. When we let our ego run amok, when we perform mental gymnastics to bend the truth, when we succumb to addiction — it’s usually not a result of intentionally sabotaging yourself, but of failing to notice how your default brain is invisibly guiding your actions. And mindfulness, as defined above, is tautologically the exercise of noticing those discursions. And it’s a lot easier to direct your brain once you know where your brain is trying to take you in the first place.

Moreover, once you increase the aperture on meditation to include everything, it can start to function as a laboratory of studying the experience of consciousness. And while this might sound somewhat abstract, I think this is something we all deeply long to understand better — what are we? What is life? While I can’t promise meditation can answer those questions, it can certainly provide perspective on what you are in relation to them.

Final comment, if you’re starting out

One final comment I want to make: you can (and should) do this all the time, not just during a circumscribed meditation time. The goal is to be able to be mindful all the time (and particularly in instances where it’s very difficult to be mindful) — to extend the pristine, clean-room awareness that you cultivate during practice to the rest of your life.

To that end, one of the biggest unlocks for me in my mindfulness practice has been trying to actively bring my mindfulness practice to moments where I’m stuck in an all-consuming default mode. Sometimes that’s when I’m feeling particularly emotional: when someone cuts me off while driving, when I’m locked in a heated argument. Other times, it’s when I’m in a state of bliss — when I’m on vacation, when I’m having a great conversation with a friend or my wife, when I’m snowboarding or exercising.

In reactive situations, mindfulness gives me some distance from the feeling itself, allowing me more room to process it well. And in more positive situations, it allows me to be present in the moment to a far greater extent than I would otherwise. And what value is there in life if you’re not present in it?

1. Wonderful book, by the way.

2. Through Sam Harris’s book, Waking Up.

3. This is not to dismiss the importance of the undistracted state, nor to deny that it’s possible to achieve just as much through what I’m reductively calling “wellness meditation”. There’s quite a lot of benefit to training yourself to notice something like your breath, but I’m sharing this perspective because I believe that it’s a much more common misunderstanding to feel that distractions are a failure state, not an object of meditation themselves, hence the emphasis.

4. For those of you familiar with mindfulness meditation, I’m sorry if this is overly reductive. There is certainly a lot more nuance to what you can discover through practice, and my intent is certainly not to diminish those insights. I only hope to simplify the process of getting started so that others might have a clearer understanding of what mindfulness meditation is trying to accomplish. While I believe some apps (Waking Up, 10% Happier) do this reasonably well, I find that you’re often plopped into practice with only a vague understanding of the objective, when I’d contend that the most proximate mindset shifts are actually simple to articulate.