Can't focus? Thoughts going in circles? These struggles are 2,500 years old — and modern brain science has caught up with the remedy. Meditation Basics is a free 20-leaf primer on the proven benefits of meditation and how to start: posture, breath, focus, and the power of sound.
In days carved to pieces by notifications, a wandering focus is not your fault. Human attention has become a prize to be fought over. But here is what we know: attention can be retrained.
You can't recall the book you know you read. That may not be a failing memory — your mind simply wasn't "here" at the time. Studies report that the practice of keeping the mind present supports the faculties that govern memory.
The plate is empty before you noticed — that isn't weak will; it's eating with the mind elsewhere. Research reports that simply bringing awareness to each bite changed how much, and how, people ate.
The same regrets and worries circle through your head, lap after lap. That rumination is the work of a circuit that switches itself on whenever the brain idles. Brain imaging shows this circuit quieting down in experienced meditators.
Everyone has seasons when the glasses of pessimism will not come off. Mindfulness-based therapy has shown effects comparable to medication in preventing relapse of depression, and is used in clinical care today. Take heart — there is a way.
A restless mind, unending anxiety — people in India were already facing these in earnest more than 2,500 years ago. They are humanity's common troubles. You are not unusually weak. The problem is that old, and that universal.
The art of observation that began with the Buddha has been pared, sharpened, and handed down across thousands of years. It has endured a polishing longer than the history of Japan itself — a summit of human attainment, you might say. Trendy life hacks are orders of magnitude younger.
In 1979, at a university hospital in the United States, meditation became a medical program (MBSR) — and thousands of research papers have accumulated since. For easing stress and anxiety, the effects have been confirmed again and again. No faith required — it has been verified.
MRI studies report changes in gray matter — including the hippocampus, which serves memory — before and after an eight-week meditation program. Meditation is not wishful thinking; it is a way of working on the brain as an organ. Just as strength training reshapes the body.
Your heartbeat and your breathing will not slow down just because you will them to. Yet reports from around the world show heart and breath rates gently settling through meditation practice. You already know it — "only action produces results." That action is here.
Close your eyes and try to think of nothing. Within ten seconds you will notice thoughts using your brain without your permission. A monkey leaping from tree to tree — in the world of meditation this is the monkey mind, the very face of the root of our troubles.
Your brain feels like yours to command — but it isn't, not really. Mindfulness is the state in which the brain is freed from the monkey, its power available to this very moment. And experiments confirm that meditation brings us closer to it.
Meditation is not about "becoming empty." Notice that you have drifted, and gently return — this one round trip is what meditation really is. Each time you notice and return, the muscle of the mind grows one repetition stronger.
An unshakable mind begins with an unshakable posture. Cross-legged or in a chair, either is fine — set your pelvis upright, spine hanging as if suspended from the sky. This way of sitting, at least, has not changed in thousands of years.
Close the eyes that carry eighty percent of your information, and the world falls quiet at once. If you grow sleepy, keep them half-open, gazing softly downward — the "half-lidded eyes." A time-honored placement of the eyes, handed down in Zen halls.
To calm the monkey, plant a single perch for the mind. The breath, counting breaths (susokukan), or a sound. Even with nothing at all, the feel of air through the nostrils is meditation enough.
The in-breath is slightly cool; the out-breath, slightly warm. Merely reaching for that faint difference drops the mind's anchor into the here and now. The oldest meditation there is — and it needs no tools.
Buddhism noticed long ago that sound, too, holds a power that draws us toward nirvana. Joya-no-kane — the 108 tolls said to extinguish worldly desires on New Year's Eve in Japan — is that culture in crystal form. Sound is a road that reaches the heart directly.
Deliver slightly different frequencies to each ear, and the brain entrains to the gap (4 Hz, say) — giving rise, studies suggest, to the theta waves involved in deep focus and the sorting of memory. The soothing power of ASMR, spread worldwide through YouTube, is familiar evidence that sound can change the brain. And remarkably, the ring of a singing bowl also reaches the two ears with just such a subtle difference.
Millennia of acoustic wisdom, and the science of binaural sound. Meimei's temple tones are drawn from both wells. Now, close the sutras — and first, sit.
Open Meimei — a free meditation app