Learn from mistakes before you make them

If you’re new to mindfulness meditation: welcome. If you’re not new: welcome anyway.

Before we start… “mindfulness meditation” is quite the mouthful. Personally I think of mindfulness as a thing you might do at any time during many things you might do in everyday life, and mindfulness meditation as the specific practice where your focus is on improving the skill. This distinction isn’t really all that useful in terms of learning as a beginner, and I’m going to cover more advanced concepts anyway, so I’ll just call it “mindfulness” throughout the rest of this book.

Why bother with mindfulness?

Just to check in with the beginners so we’re on the same page: what’s the point of doing mindfulness, anyway? Well, if you look at all the popular sources on the internet and scientific research, you’ll find a few things that show up basically every single time. Let’s focus on the big points with strong scientific support: stress and anxiety reduction; improved ability to focus and other cognitive improvements.

That’s not wrong, but I’ll claim additional benefits on top, most notably freeing yourself of baggage from the past that is dragging you down. This is obviously harder to prove conclusively in a scientific sense because the strongest level of scientific support comes from things that can be fit into a nicely controlled study, and individual life experience is kind of hard to box in like that. It would, in theory, be possible to do a long-term study in which participants keep getting coached individually by mindfulness experts, but that’s ridiculously expensive and I don’t see it happening any time soon. I hope that I’ll be able to convince you that it’s still a reasonable conclusion to make, even if I can’t exactly prove it to scientific standards.

Another thing worth mentioning is that my experience (and also the experience of many others I’ve encountered) supports the notion that mindfulness can help to dissolve habitual tension, which makes life less enjoyable in many subtle ways (in fact, chronic tension can lead to chronic pain in extreme cases). I have a totally unproven hypothesis that this also includes a range of medical issues that are difficult to pin down in medical practice, but since this is even more vague and controversial, I’m not going to go into more detail here. If you’re going to give mindfulness a serious try and really commit to it at some point, you can draw your own conclusions about this.

Besides mindfulness, other styles of meditation allow you to experience vastly altered states of consciousness, and create new ways of learning and processing. This isn’t going to be the focus of this book, but I’m going to cover it to some extent simply because I think it’s really cool, but there are quite a few pitfalls and it doesn’t feel right to completely skip over this huge well of mistakes to be made.

How the heck can something do so much?

Excellent question. Again, this would be challenging to prove, but the general effect of mindfulness is making it easier to let things go, including things that you aren’t even really aware of yet (awareness improves with practice). I’ll clarify this a little more throughout the book, but even this short explanation does sort of seem relevant to things like insomnia, stress, anxiety, tension etc. Right?

I was very tempted to dive into a very detailed explanation of how I think it all works. It wouldn’t have been an explanation that I could prove (again, hard to do in the first place), but I think it’s quite plausible and it doesn’t even have to be right for it to be a useful way of thinking. Ultimately, though, I figured that would be a bit too much to start out with. Instead, I’ll still cover all of it but it’s now simply a thread that runs through the whole book. So, don’t worry, I’m not swindling you out of the details, I’m just hiding them a little better.

Why should you listen to me?

Maybe you shouldn’t, actually. I don’t have any formal qualifications to teach, I don’t have 50 years of experience, I’m not even in the official top 100 of mindfulness practitioners (that’s not a thing, of course). What I have to offer is that I’ve made many, many mistakes, and I’ve talked to other people who have made mistakes, and also to people who have fixed their mistakes. This is my attempt to condense all of that into a convenient 2000 pages. Well, maybe a little less.

The structure of this book

To make things easy, I’ve split everything up into convenient steps to follow. In each step, first I’ll tell you how to do it as incorrectly as possible… then I’ll explain which aspects of the step matter the most, and finally I’ll outline how to do it better and what alternatives to consider. Sound good?

Well then, with all of the important introductory points out of the way, let’s dive right in.