Meditation Exercises

Back to Happiness and Wisdom Course Main Page

Mindfulness Meditation Exercise

Meditation

This wiki page just gives you a simple set of instructions for a basic "mindfulness meditation". As you will discover from the "Meditation Resource Page for Fall 2023" and other sources, meditation encompasses a wide range of practices and goals. Some are connected to religious and spiritual traditions, while others are not. The mindfulness meditation exercise described in this self-guided resource page is a simple skill which does not presume any philosophical or religious belief. It really involves two basic skills: quieting the mind and becoming a better observer of how the mind works. Quieting the mind is the real challenge, in part because that's not quite the way the mind works naturally.

Before you begin, it might be helpful to remind you of some of the reasons people value this particular sort of meditation:

• 1) Quieting the mind helps you realize how noisy it is by nature and how mental contents appear and often dominate our attention.
• 2) Quieting the mind is intrinsically pleasant.
• 3) Quieting the mind helps you become more attentive to your environment, and more reflective and deliberate about some of your responses.
• 4) Watching noisy minds with a quiet mind can be a source of insight.
• 5) Quieting the mind is often an initial step to other meditation goals.

This section gathers links, articles, and ideas on mindfulness meditation. If you are thinking about doing the mindfulness exercises for one of my classes, this is a good place to start.

First Mindfulness Exercise:  A Sitting Meditation Focused on Breathing and the Body

Before starting your meditation, update your todo list and consider putting your phone on "do not disturb". Your mind is designed to remind you of things, and it's hard not to peek at a new text message. To-do items and planning are are just the sorts of things the mind naturally takes us to if it doesn't know we are on top of things.

Find a quiet room (a church or chapel works, or a time when your roommates are asleep) as a setting for your meditation.  Pick a time of day when you are not too tired or hungry and when you do not have to rush to an appointment immediately after meditating.  If you are very tired when you meditate, you might fall asleep, which is not a bad thing, but not the same as meditating. If you have to go to class or some other appointment immediately after meditating, you might be distracted and not relax during your mediation. You can consider an outside location away from noise and people, but some people find that this does not work.

You might want to start by doing some stretches, since distractions from your body are not helpful during meditation. Then, start your meditation by sitting upright in a comfortable position, either on a chair or the floor. If you are sitting on the floor, you may want to support your back against a wall. Avoid slouching. Try to straighten your spine to balance the weight of your upper body. Feel the weight of your body and notice the places where there is either body to body pressure or body to floor pressure. Try to reduce pressure points. Adjust your posture to distribute your weight. Office chairs are often great for mediating because they help us maintain good posture and can be tilted to balance our weight. Avoid meditating while wearing a tight belt or clothing which restricts your abdomen during breathing.

Close your eyes and pay attention to your breathing.  Take normal breaths. If possible, keep your mouth closed and breath through your nose so that you can hear and feel the breath through the throat and sinuses, as in yoga. The breath is important in meditation because it is a sound you can concentrate on but it doesn't have any particular meaning. That is also true of mantras. They are word-sounds that have no meaning to the user. "Om-mani padme-hum" is a common mantra. You can say the first part inhaling, the middle part as you turn to exhale, and the last part as you exhale.

At the start, you might try selectively contracting and relaxing muscles in different parts of your body, working up from your feet.  Take your time with each muscle group. Slowly tense the muscles and relax them, perhaps in tune with your breathing (e.g. one to two breaths to tighten, then relax and exhale). Avoid retightening the muscle group as you move on. In succession, tighten and relax the muscles in your feet, your lower legs, your thighs, your buttocks and abdomen, your chest, arms, neck, face and head.  Stretch your neck all around your collar bone to relax it. This should all take time. Don't rush. As you become quietly aware of your body, return your attention to your breathing when your mind takes you to your everyday concerns.

As you start your meditation, many thoughts will occur to you to distract you from your attention to your breathing. Within a minute or so you will probably find yourself thinking about something that you need to do or something that is coming up in your life. You'll remember that you have to get groceries, finish a paper, call someone, etc. Fortunately, this is what our mind is designed to do, but it is not helpful in cultivating a quiet mind and inner calm. Acknowledge that you are thinking about these things and then make a conscious choice to turn your attention gently back to your breathing and your body. If you use too much pressure, your mind will push back by making you think about those things. Actively suppressed thoughts tend to return. There are many tricks you can invent to gently move your concentration back to breath and the body. For example, if you are replaying a scene from your recent experience, imagine it is on a video screen and turn it off. Sometimes engaging the thought for a short time makes it easier to turn away from.

If something keeps intruding (like an appointment that you might forget or a task that you suddenly remember), you might want to just open your eyes and jot it down.

The goal of focusing on breathing is to quiet the mind and notice what the mind does during this process. The mind is sometimes referred to in meditation circles (and, originally, in Buddhist writing) as a "chattering monkey," distracting you from our own experience and elevating your anxiety with a steady stream of thoughts about various things you need to do in your life or that you worry about. The goal of this basic meditation is to return you to your wonderful and busy life, but with a calmer mind that has better concentration.

Variations in meditation and other resources

You can explore variations of many kinds in your meditations, but my recommendation is that you focus most of your early practice on the basic mind-quieting exercise.

You do not always have to be focused on the body and the breath, or even a mantra. There are sound meditations, concentration meditations (in which you keep your eyes open and engaged in a relaxed focus on an object, or keep them closed and concentrate on an object in your mind), meditations to build particular kinds of affect like compassion, gratitude, kindness, etc. Some of the reading by Matthieu Ricard from Why Meditate goes into this, but you would want the book to explore them. Meditative music is often helpful, but I do think there is a value to being alone with your mind without other voices or sounds.

Some sites with guided meditation.

• UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior: https://www.uclahealth.org/programs/marc/free-guided-meditations/guided-meditations. This site has some free audio meditations that students have found helpful. This page on the site has good introductory videos.
• U. Mass Medical Center has a famous mindfulness meditation research program:[1]. They pioneered what is now called "Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)" courses.
• A list of 9 top guided meditations

Completing the Assignment

I recommend that you make meditations daily for this assignment, if you can, but at least try to meditate 4-6 times a week. If you can go right up to 20-30 minutes great, but most people prefer to work their way from 5-10 minutes up to a longer meditation. Short meditations can be a great strategy, but even with experience it might take 5-10 minutes to get into a meditative state. So if you make it too short, you may never get there. If you have a very busy week and need to extend the assignment, that's fine. The point is to get a lot from your meditation so that you actually look forward to spending time in a meditative state.

For this assignment you should commit to about 4 weeks of meditation and turn in one journal each week describing your experience in relation to the goal.

The first journal or two should focus on things that are going well or are challenging in your practice. Ideally by weeks 2 or 3 you are getting what might be called a meditation effect. A basic meditation effect is a little bit like the refreshing feeling of a short nap, along with a sense the someone has turned down the volume control and ambient noise in your mind. If you get to week 3 and have not had that experience, let's talk about the obstacles.

Assuming you are getting a mediation effect of some kind, the third and fourth journals should reflect on how things look and feel after a particularly good mediation. Do you look at stressful situations differently? Do you approach problems differently? You do not need to report positive results for this assignment to receive credit. The goal is to experience meditation and, hopefully, notice some effects from it.

You can also decide that the assignment isn't for you and simply remove it from your grading scheme.

You can also email me with questions and to report difficulties apart from your journal entries.