Tag: Meditation

Tips, guides and thoughts about meditation practice.

Make a Meditation/Daily Mindfulness Habit That Sticks – A Guided Tool

A simple tool for making a meditation or daily mindfulness practice that sticks, using the Tiny Habits methodology by BJ Fogg.

It can be hard to make meditation and mindfulness practice habits. This isn’t a personal failing, it’s just that none of us are taught how to design habits!

This short tool will guide you through the process of setting up a meditation practice or short daily mindfulness habit using the methods from the book Tiny Habits, by B.J.… Read the rest “Make a Meditation/Daily Mindfulness Habit That Sticks – A Guided Tool”

How to Cultivate Joy in Meditation

Joy is the lubricant that makes progress in meditation smoother and faster. This tip will help you to cultivate that joy as you practise.

The development of meditative joy is one of the best things you can do for your meditation practice. It’s something that you can do right from day one – I’m not talking here about some esoteric meditative joy that you need to have wizard-level concentration to experience.… Read the rest “How to Cultivate Joy in Meditation”

Mindfulness, and the Difference Between Attention and Awareness

Until you understand this key distinction, you won’t be getting the full benefit of mindfulness, or understanding its very real limitations.

Not Just Attention

Mindfulness is usually defined in terms of paying attention (e.g. “paying attention to the present moment”) but this leads to confusion and inconsistencies.

For one thing, it is impossible to pay attention to “the present moment”, which consists of an impossibly vast amount of data from our senses, only a tiny percentage of which we are able to pay attention to at any one time.… Read the rest “Mindfulness, and the Difference Between Attention and Awareness”

A Meditator’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Attention

Three insights from attentional neuroscience to improve your concentration in meditation.

Note: Probably the most important lesson about attention is that you need to learn to balance it with awareness – I’m writing this for an audience who I assume will already be familiar with this attention-awareness interplay that’s spelled out in the book The Mind Illuminated.… Read the rest “A Meditator’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Attention”

The (Sort of) Complete Guide to Actually Getting Better at Meditation

Here are the six steps to actually getting better at meditation, according to psychology.

Contents

  • Introduction
  • Prelude – Understanding Mental Representations
  • The Elements of Deliberate Practice
    • 1: A Highly Developed Field
    • 2: Target Specific Sub-Skills
    • 3: Clear and Immediate Feedback
    • 4: Focused Practice
    • A Brief Interlude About the Dangers of Over-Efforting
    • 5: Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
    • 6: Continued Engagement
  • A TL;DR Summary of Deliberate Practice

Introduction

Most meditation instructions that you’ll find go something like this:

  1. Place your attention on the object of meditation (usually the sensations of breathing at the nostrils) and keep it there.
… Read the rest “The (Sort of) Complete Guide to Actually Getting Better at Meditation”

I Wasted 8 Years of Meditation Because I Didn’t Understand These 4 Things

Most people meditate for a long time with little improvement because of these four myths.

Contents

  • Introduction
  • Striving for unusual or one-off experiences
  • Misunderstanding non-judgemental awareness
  • Thinking that trying to exert any kind of effort in meditation is a mistake
  • Extremely vague or unstructured meditation instructions
  • Conclusion

Introduction

“I’ve been practicing meditation for a few years, but I still can’t keep my attention on my breath for more than a few seconds at a time.… Read the rest “I Wasted 8 Years of Meditation Because I Didn’t Understand These 4 Things”