Meditation
Mindfulness and meditation are some of the most important tools to have if you want to change the way you think about things, how you react to circumstances in your life and how you show up in your actions and results. As meditation has moved from a fringe practice in the West to a more mainstream approach, we have naturally accumulated some beliefs about whether meditation really works and how much time it takes. This article from Harvard gives a good review of the evidence showing that meditation creates measurable brain changes, although many meditation studies done up till now suffer from poor methodology. 
In this post, I will talk about the how of meditation more than the why and hopefully get you started on something which has the potential to help you make massive changes in your life.
Victor E. Frankl, Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, said
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Fundamentally, meditation and mindfulness practices increase the length of this space and our awareness of it. Our power to choose our response will allow us to grow closer to the life we want to lead.
Anchors
Meditation is the process of focussing attention on an anchor in order to build the skill of drawing the brains attention back to a single object, over and over again. There are a number of common anchors, such as the breath, walking, body scan, ambient sound, open awareness, heartbeat, mantras.
Meditation with Breath
This is the most classic anchor in meditation. In his accessible and humorous mini-classic How to Relax, Thich Nhat Hanh presents the following ‘Resting Poem’ which he says is like a tiny vacation:
Breathing in, I know I am breathing in.
Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.
He says you can even shorten this to:
In.
Out.
Meditation with breath is always available to you and we do this very naturally. Every time you take a couple of deep breaths before trying something new, you are deliberately being in the moment and allowing deep breathing to still your mind and body. Every time you take a couple of deep breaths instead of yelling at your partner or kids, you are practicing mindfulness and a mini meditation. Swimming, singing, playing wind instruments – these are focussed activities where breathing deliberately is an important way to enhance performance.
When you are first learning how to pay attention to your breathing, it may be helpful to focus on a particular aspect of breath, for example, you may really feel how the belly expands and deflates with the in and out breaths. Or how the chest rises and falls. Or how the air feels in your nostrils. You may count a certain number for the in breath, hold for a count and then slowly exhale (for a number equal to or greater than the in breath). These different aspects of paying attention to breath are intended to assist you in training your mind to be in the present moment, neither looking back at the past, nor anticipating the future. There is no right or wrong way to engage in meditation with breath – just pay attention to the breath and follow it.
Thoughts
When the mind is resting in the breath, it is natural that thoughts will come up. The goal is to allow the thought to rise up without following it, but of course, thoughts flow quickly and so you may often notice that your thoughts have wandered off to the mundane of what is for supper, or the apprehensive of what is coming up at work or in your personal life, or the retrospective blaming and shaming of the “stupid” thing you said yesterday at work, or the fight you had with a loved one. When you notice that your mind is thinking, gently guide it back to following the breath.
Emotions may also come up during this process. At first, they are likely to be reacting to the thoughts you are having, so for example, you may feel hunger or anticipation if your mind has wandered to what’s for lunch. You may feel self blame, shame and guilt if your thoughts wander more than you think they should. Accepting that minds like to think and they will naturally do so will reduce these kinds of reactive emotions. Just as we rarely get upset with a baby who cries, needs a diaper change or has trouble falling asleep because that’s just what babies do, we should practice not being upset when our brains do what they do best – think.
Emotions
Emotions may also arise spontaneously once you get better at following the breath and gently redirecting thoughts that come up without getting invested in an emotional response to having had a thought. These may seem to come out of nowhere – a rush of sadness, anger or joy. Probably the first spontaneous emotions that will arise will be those of boredom, physical discomfort, itchiness, judgement (“It is so stupid to just sit here.”). These are great opportunities to allow emotions to be present in the body without judgement and without acting on them. Just as minds have thoughts, bodies have feelings. And when we deliberately still our minds and bodies, thoughts and emotions naturally arise. Meditation with breath is naturally suited to managing the intensity of negative emotions.
As Gay Hendricks said in his excellent book: The Big Leap:
Fear is excitement without the breath.
Processing Emotions
A great technique to stay in your body and be mindful of the emotion you are having without thinking thoughts which perpetuate the emotion or thoughts which blame you for having the emotion is to really notice the nuances of the emotion IN your body. Where is it in your body? Does it have a colour? Does it have a texture? Is it moving or stationary? Does it radiate anywhere? While doing this, keep practicing meditation with breath. In other words, keep breathing in and out, and take a couple of deeper breaths when your description feels stalled. Reassess the character of the emotion after the deeper breaths. It may have changed its location, intensity, colour etc.
Another way you can respond to the emotion is to think of it as being an expression of a child aspect of yourself – if the emotion is boredom, you might interact with it like a toddler who is complaining about a road trip. Lovingly but firmly reassure this aspect of yourself that the meditation will not last forever and that the boredom will pass. Redirect your attention onto the breath when that is available to you and allow the emotion to float on by, like a cloud overhead.
TL;DR
The point of meditation with breath is to NOTICE what your mind is doing and REDIRECT your mind back to the breath. This builds the skill of BEING in the MOMENT and choosing where to direct your ATTENTION. Spending even 5-10 minutes per day in this way will yield brain changes that allow you to choose your RESPONSE to a STIMULUS more deliberately.