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. In the spirit of talking about ways in which to do it “badly”, I’m going to focus less on the applications and more on the typical reasons why people struggle with anything going in that general direction.

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?

How to actually succeed in learning this kind of thing

Here’s an easy mistake to make especially for analytically minded people, and one that I made myself for quite a few years: when you discover something like mindfulness, you read a lot of material about it to try and understand the theory as completely as possible. If you take this path, you’ll end up knowing a lot about mindfulness, but you won’t develop any actual skills.

There’s a sneaky variation on this: you’ll decide to read the whole thing so you know all the steps, and then you’ll know what to do and can start practicing everything at once.

Let me tell you, it really really doesn’t work that way. Each step has a lot of subtlety in it that you have to learn to recognize. Doing everything at once will flood your mind with many very subtle cues and that’s just a big mess for it to puzzle out. It will either not find any patterns at all or, more likely, the wrong patterns, and then you develop skills that look a bit like mindfulness but fail in important ways.

As a result, I very strongly recommend that you read this one chapter at a time, and spend at least a few days on each before you move on to the next. You’ll want to stack the odds for your mind to learn to recognize subtle signs and patterns before you start adding more nuance and layers. The only way to reliably achieve that is to space it out and practice one thing after the other. I’ll include some pointers for cases in which it truly might be better to skip a step, and maybe return to it later.

The other big mistake to make is to feel like you’re on a schedule and you need to learn fast and efficiently. You can’t control how long it will take until a step sinks in. Trying to rush it will usually make it take much longer or stop you from succeeding altogether. You can’t “force” your mind to make it happen. The much better approach is to do any exercise in a lighthearted way, much like you’d treat a curious spontaneous experiment you came up with, and not worry about any direct results (and I can tell you right now that there won’t be any, starting out). As a rule of thumb, the less pressure you put on yourself (to do it well, to do it quickly, to do it smartly…), the easier it will be and the sooner it will start to “work”.

Creating a reasonable practice schedule

People work in different kinds of ways. Some people work best with structure, others struggle with that. I don’t know what’s going to work for you, but as a general rule, try whichever ways you can think of that result in you practicing often. “Often” is much more valuable than “long sessions at a time”. One person might plan short sessions two or three times per day (and once per day is still much better than very irregularly), another might manage better by not setting specific times but bundling practice sessions with other activities (e.g. while doing the dishes, brushing your teeth, riding a bus…). Do what works for you. If you have a lot of trouble with consistency, this might take some creative thinking. If you have to put a stuffed unicorn on your door handle to remind you, that might seem silly, but whatever works is allowed!

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