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.

Step 1: obsess over breathing

If you look for introductions to mindfulness, almost without fail, they’ll tell you to observe your breathing, and whenever you get distracted, bring your attention back to the breath, “gently”, and keep going. So, let’s sit down and breathe.

For most people, conscious breathing feels kind of weird, so you’re probably going to get annoyed about that, then annoyed at yourself because how could an exercise like this possibly be so hard, you’ve already gotten distracted, what the hell? All kinds of other thoughts might come in and you’ll desperately try to ignore them, ignore the annoying sounds from the outside world that are trying to invade your awareness, and feel like you no longer know how to breathe ”normally”.

There are two ways to cope with that, of course: either give up after a few moments, telling yourself you’ll just try again later and hoping that things will be totally different then… or you keep going until your twenty-minute timer has run out, getting steadily more frustrated along the way.

An alternative way to get frustrated is because you might find these exercises incredibly boring. Breathing isn’t exactly five star entertainment, is it? So, your mind will wander to make sure you don’t actually die of boredom. You’ll also be not all that motivated to continue exposing yourself to the same boredom over and over. And thus endeth your mindfulness journey before it even really began.

Of course, the obvious implied goal is to keep pushing until you can easily focus on nothing but your breath for two hours.

What matters about this step

Remember how I mentioned in the introduction that mindfulness is about letting things go? The funny thing is that the breath-based exercises seem to be about focusing hard on one single thing, first and foremost… but that’s only half of the story. If you think it’s mostly about the focus, you’ll tend to draw all the wrong conclusions when your mind wanders or when random other things (or thoughts) distract you.

Don’t get me wrong, focus is one of the things these exercises are about. A crucial component of mindfulness is “staying present”, and it’s also the hardest thing to explain about mindfulness. Let me try, because there’s really no way around understanding this.

Attention, focus and awareness

Have you ever done something on autopilot? The dishes, maybe, or driving (on a familiar route, with nothing unusual going on, e.g. maybe on the way home in the late evening)… there are lots of things you’re good enough at so that you can do them while thinking about basically anything else, or sort of daydreaming. Then, when something unexpected happens, e.g. one of the dishes slips out of your hands, or the car in front of you suddenly brakes, it immediately grabs your attention and you’re instantly focused back on your task.

This is the way we function most of the time, and it’s also the way things work inside our minds most of the time. When there’s nothing that pulls your focus (like a video game, a book, a complex task that is roughly within your skill range, etc.), your attention will wander and more or less random thoughts and/or imagination will start doing their thing.

On the other end of things, sometimes your attention gets pulled in by something. Suppose the driver in front of you cuts you off… you might start thinking about how much of a jerk they are, and how annoying it all is, and it’s easy to keep going round and round on these thoughts for a while, until eventually your attention starts wandering again, or something else draws your attention.

So, there are two ways in which attention can run away from where we want it to be: either it just randomly starts floating off, or there’s a sharp pull of sorts by something interesting or seemingly important.

Mindfulness is about cultivating a relaxed sort of attention on what’s happening inside your mind (and body, and sphere of perception), so that you’re aware of what’s going on but without strongly focusing on anything in particular. If you managed to be perfectly mindful, your attention would not wander at all, and if something drew your attention, you could give it just as much as you want and easily go back to that relaxed attention on nothing in particular.

What do I mean by relaxed attention? Again, a bit hard to explain. I like this analogy: if you take a photograph of a small detail, for physical reasons the rest of the scene will usually be blurry and out of focus, and you’ll hardly even look at anything but the detail that’s in focus. That’s much like focused attention in general: your attention is very narrowed down on just a few things, or even just one thing, and everything else sort of just exists in the background and you sort of ignore it. A more relaxed attention is more like a photograph that’s equally blurry everywhere: there’s no one thing you focus on, so now it’s really more the overall scene you’re aware of. This is also why I call this relaxed attention “awareness”.

Focusing on your breath vs awareness

Getting good at this particular kind of awareness is quite an adjustment for most people, so the beginner exercises sort of put training wheels on it: by focusing on the breath, you use your mind in a mode you’re much more accustomed to, focusing on a detail. The breath is fairly neutral for most of us (i.e. we don’t feel strongly about it), plus it’s always there so we don’t have to prepare anything to do these exercises.

However, the ultimate goal is awareness, so there is a particular way of focusing on the breath that this exercise is about: this is what you’ll be putting your attention on, but the real goal is to get better at being more relaxed about this attention, and also about times when your attention slips away from you.

How to do it better

Again, the starting point is focusing on your breathing. For some people it might be easier to focus on a very narrow aspect of it, e.g. the feeling of the air touching the outer half of your right nostril or the sensation of your lungs expanding and contracting. For others, it might be easier to have a more general awareness of their breath. Try it both ways and see which seems to make the whole exercise easier for you.

Dealing with random thoughts and feelings

If any thoughts or emotions come up that might seem like they’re disrupting the exercise, that’s not actually a disruption, it’s a vital part of the exercise! Your “job” is to notice that they’re there but not really worry about them. Having thoughts and feelings is not forbidden, and actively trying to fight them (e.g. by trying to remove them from your awareness, or “thinking them away”, or wanting to get rid of them) actually disrupts the path to that relaxed sort of attention. In truth, if you have a thousand thoughts while you pay attention to your breath, that’s perfectly fine, and if you manage to still focus on your breath even while those thoughts are running around in your head, you’re beginning to master this stage.

The same is true with sounds coming from the outside, or bodily sensations, like a weird tingling or an itch. It’s not even like you have to resist scratching the itch. Just be sure that you don’t do it on autopilot, because we’re trying to be less autopiloted. So, feel free to scratch the itch, but make sure you do it deliberately and not thoughtlessly as an automatic action. By keeping (most of) your attention on the breath while you scratch the itch, you’re still doing everything right and you don’t need to worry about forcing yourself to ignore the sensation. In time it might get easier to just let the itching sensation happen, but that time might not be there yet. Don’t worry, it will happen at its own pace, and you don’t have to do a single thing about it.

Generally speaking, any time you notice something and let it happen while you still pay attention to the breath to some extent, that’s a sign you’re doing the right thing. Ideally the breath thing will be in the “foreground” most of the time, but that’s not a realistic expectation to have when you’re new. For now, let your goal be to keep at least a bit of your awareness on it whenever you haven’t totally gotten lost in random thoughts… which will happen.

Dealing with losing your focus

Speaking of: the other goal is to practice catching yourself when your attention wanders. And it will… a lot. This is a good thing, because each time your attention wanders gives you an opportunity to notice, and the more often you notice that your attention has wandered, the better you get at noticing. In fact this means that as a beginner you’ll learn this a lot faster than later on, because your attention will wander a lot more often.

Just like with random thoughts that come up while you’re focusing on the breath, the wandering attention is best treated as nothing to worry about. The more okay you feel about your attention having wandered, the easier it is to stay relaxed about focusing back on the breath.

Dealing with “attention black holes”

A thing that’s going to happen (more often for some and less often for others) is that something will come up and you won’t be able to help yourself getting all focused on it. It could be something totally innucuous: perhaps construction work outside keeps making noises and you start getting annoyed and then you start thinking about how annoying it is that you’re getting annoyed and then you start getting frustrated about the annoyance and the annoyance about the annoyance… well, you get the idea.

This is a preview of what being mindful in everyday life will be like much of the time. You have an initial “event” (in this case, the noise from the outside, but it could also be a thought or feeling or sensation), and then you have some automatic mental responses to that, and responses to the responses, so you’ll have a nice little chain of responses going in very short order… and often it will start going in circles very quickly since one response circles back into a rehash of a previous one, and then you’ll be on a nice little merry-go-round until it kind of loses traction, or something else draws your focus (ideally a thought like “wait, wasn’t I supposed to focus on my breath?”).

At this stage, I wouldn’t worry too much about these cases. What we’re going for, ultimately, is keeping enough of that relaxed attention, that mindfulness, going so that enough attention bleeds off of the chain of responses so that the chain sort of peters out. It might be too soon for that, so the next best thing is to not think of this as a bad thing, and certainly not a sign of failure. It’s just… something that’s going to happen. In fact, if this never happened to you at all, I’d start wondering if you’re even human.

How much time to put in

This differs very much from individual to individual. If in doubt, err on the side of “short”. Especially when starting out, much about this will be a little frustrating. In my opinion, the best time to stop is after you’ve started getting a little annoyed/frustrated and shortly before it starts drawing so much of your attention that you start getting that merry-go-round experience I was talking about earlier. So, basically, always push the boundaries a little bit, but not so far that “relaxed attention” starts feeling completely impossible.

You can do this multiple times per day if you like. There is some power in rituals, i.e. setting aside a fixed time every day to “do meditation”. Fixed times help with building habits. It’s not strictly necessary, though, and if you’re the kind of person who struggles a lot with keeping to schedules, don’t bother trying to force it. Just do it whenever.

It’s totally fine to “practice to exhaustion” (i.e. up to the point where it stops feeling relaxed) five times per day, maybe even ten times per day. For many people that might be just a few seconds, or up to maybe a minute or two, at a time. That might seem like nothing, but it will still help, and stopping soon enough makes it a lot more effective than trying to push through the frustration for five minutes.

Most likely for the duration of this step, it’s not terribly useful to exceed ten or twenty minutes total per day. There’s a limit to how much time is useful, and doing more isn’t going to speed up the results. Much of the learning our brain handles for us happens during “downtime”, and trying to force practice in nearly all the time interferes with that. So, be sure to give yourself plenty of time during which you put this whole topic aside.

If you really want to, and you’ve developed enough skill to keep going beyond that time without losing the relaxedness of your awareness, you totally can go beyond that limit, and you might get interesting results out of it, but don’t feel like you have to.

How should I breathe?

It really doesn’t matter. There are some approaches to meditation that are more centered on specific breathing techniques, but that’s not what we care about here. If you struggle with conscious breathing and want something as a reference so you don’t obsess over the details too much: breathe more or less normally, but slightly more slowly than you would normally: longer inhales, longer exhales, longer pauses in between. This isn’t about challenging yourself to breathe as slowly as possible, and there is no fixed target rate. It’s really just to give you something to do, plus slowing down the breathing tends to help focus a little and counteracts an overhyped nervous system to some extent. Just make sure it still feels fairly easy.

The folly of deep breathing

I’ll tell you a secret: people get way too focused on deep breaths. There is surprisingly little benefit to those. Let’s think about it in terms of physics for a bit: both the rate and depth of your breaths affect the volume of inhale and exhale in a given amount of time. If you breathe at the same depth but more slowly, the volume per time decreases. If you breathe at the same rate but more deeply, the volume per time increases. If you slow down and increase the depth, typically the volume per time will not actually change much! In other words, if you slow down the breathing but also breathe more deeply, you’re not really changing anything, except it will tend to feel more awkward.

To simplify the physiological aspect a little (the full story involves talking about the oxygen/carbon dioxide balance in the blood, but we don’t have that kind of time here): less volume per time = more relaxation (activating the parasympathetic nervous system), more volume per time = more “activation” (sympathetic nervous system). Both have their place, but for exercise purposes, relaxation tends to be helpful, which is why I recommend slowing down your rate of breathing a bit. Chances are it won’t make a huge difference, but it doesn’t hurt either.

Deep breathing is more useful if you want more stuff to happen. There are a bunch of breathing techniques that are meant to achieve this, e.g. “fire breathing”. We’ll talk about that later. For now, don’t bother with deep breaths. Just breathe at a natural-feeling depth.

What if you keep struggling anyway?

There are some ways in which this can still be difficult:

• Remember how I said that for most of us, breathing is fairly neutral? For some people that’s not true. There might be tension or pain tied up in conscious breathing for you. If that’s the case for you, don’t push too hard on this step, and just move on to the next one. Keep in mind the overall goals and important bits from this step, the only difference is that you won’t be focusing on the breath.

• If you have a particularly high level of difficulty focusing, you will almost definitely hate this exercise much more than you’ll be able to handle with your beginner-level skill of relaxed attention. You can still make progress by being very strict about stopping whenever the sense of boredom or frustration gets too much to handle (and, again, err on the side of caution, you don’t have to prove anything to anyone here, nobody else knows what you’re doing and I’m not going to tell anyone)… but you might prefer to skip this step altogether and move on to the next one, remembering the general takeaways from this step about relaxed attention, how to deal with distractions, and so forth. You might even have an easier time with the next step than most other people, because step two is designed to be much more permissive about what happens inside your mind.

If there are any other reasons you’re having trouble with this, please get in touch so I can (hopefully) provide pointers and also include them here with an update, so that others can benefit from the same insights.

Step 2: try to take in all of the outside world at once

Another common beginner-level exercise is to “be mindful of your surroundings”. Let’s call it “external mindfulness”. The obvious way of doing that is to start turning your head this way and that way, trying to take in as many details as possible, all at the same time. Naturally, this will involve a certain level of struggle, because who can keep track of everything? Just like in step 1, thoughts will enter the picture, maybe about how challenging this is, how frustrating it feels to not be able to follow these very basic instructions, maybe confusion about what the hell you’re supposed to be doing, anyway, and what the point of it all is.

What matters about this step

Compared to step 1, there is no difference in objectives or skills you’re supposed to be building. You’re cultivating the same sort of relaxed attention as in the breath-based exercise. That means that scrambling to take in as many details as possible is counterproductive.

Different kinds of observation

Aside from how hard you focus on something, there are other distinctions that can be made. Most of the time, your awareness of the outside world will be somewhat abstract: if you pass by a tree and waste any thought on it at all, usually it’s going to be “well, that’s a tree there” or, perhaps, “oh look, a birch tree”. Rarely does it get more involved than that.

Abstraction is a way of reducing cognitive load: instead of looking at all the details, you can just look at an object and your mind helpfully supplies its pre-made (learned) conclusions about what you’re looking at. As a result, you can recognize a chair as a chair with zero effort (aside from maybe some fringe cases where it might be hard to tell if you’re looking at a chair or a stool, for example).

True observation involves intentionally looking for sensory details. This doesn’t eliminate abstraction: you’ll still look at a chair and recognize that it’s a chair… but you might choose to focus in addition on specific details. For example, you might notice that the chair is red, or white, or brownish, or whatever. That it maybe has rounded edges. That the back rest is rounded, or straight. That its surface is slightly shiny, or matte. And so forth.

If you were to try and shovel as many of these details into your brain as possible, that would, once again, be counter-productive. Instead, you could choose a random thing to look at, in no particular hurry, and pick a random property that you notice about it, and just observe that quality for a moment. Then, you can move on to another.

The same kind of thinking applies to all of your other senses, but it’s easiest with visuals. However, you could totally walk through a busy area and notice all the individual sounds. And each sound has properties, too: it might be loud or quiet, tonal or atonal, high-pitched or low-pitched, harsh, soft… you get the idea.

Widening the focus

Another approach – that is a little harder to grasp at first – is to focus less on any particular aspect of what you’re perceiving, and get more of an overall sense. The way it made the most sense to me when I was starting out was by likening it to peripheral vision. Go ahead and focus on a spot in your field of vision, something not too close if you don’t want to have to strain your eyes. Keeping your focus there, try to be more aware of the fringe areas of your field of vision rather than that spot itself. This can be a bit tricky at first, but once you start getting there, you’ll notice that you’re not really able to see any details from your peripheral vision, it’s a much more vague sense of the things in that area. Your peripheral vision is extremely good at picking up movement, though, so if you do this in a public setting, you might notice that it’s surprisingly easy to see things or people moving while not actually looking at them directly.

What’s the use of this? Well, in the previous section I talked about removing some abstraction and getting closer to the sensory data, by focusing on individual details. Focusing on nothing in particular is the “nuclear” option: if you don’t even focus on any object, there’s no abstraction going on at all! As a beginner you’ll still have some “accidental abstraction“ purely out of habit, but that’s perfectly fine. Some practice, and not worrying too much about habits like that, is all it takes.

Getting rid of abstractions

So, we’re unabstracting… but why?

This is actually a bit of a sneak preview of one of the core principles of mindfulness: not judging, observing impartially. Abstraction are undoubtedly useful (and, in fact, pretty much unavoidable to be able to function), but they can go wrong: sometimes, your mind will create abstractions that are questionable or outright harmful. For a drastic example, someone might have created an abstraction saying that seeing a dog means danger, so they’ll panic when they see a dog.

Now, this is another of those things I won’t be able to prove, but based on my experience, I’m fairly certain that part of the reason it’s so difficult to get rid of a phobia is that you’re stuck in the abstraction: every time you see a dog and you freak out, that “proves” to you that the abstraction is correct, and so you keep reaffirming the abstraction. This is not something you do deliberately, of course, it’s just the natural consequence of not being able to separate the abstraction from the actual thing. Instead, people will get sidetracked “arguing” with the abstraction… meaning they’ll fight the abstraction on its home turf: in the abstract. This has never been effective for me, and I’ve talked to many people who have never had any success with this, either. Staying away from the abstract level and on the experiential side of things is much more likely to open up space for change.

We’ll get back to this in more detail later. For now, what does that mean for external mindfulness? Honestly, bypassing abstractions in these exercises isn’t useful in itself, but it lays a foundation for building the ability to bypass other abstractions in other contexts. It’s one of those things that seem kind of stupid but will make a huge difference later, just like practicing your scales when learning to play an instrument, or drawing lots of straight lines and circles and random curves to improve your drawing skills.

How to do it better

The basic version

The guiding principle is: relaxed, lazy observation. Let your focus wander a bit and let it rest on random things and random qualities of those things. Initially, you’ll find it hard to keep your focus on one thing and quality for extended periods of time, and you don’t want to force it because then you’ll learn to associate struggle and frustration with this exercise.

Instead, keep your attention on that single thing and quality until you start getting a bit restless. Notice that feeling of restlessness and maybe a bit of frustration and some thoughts that creep up along with them. There is nothing wrong at all with these feelings and thoughts, they’re completely natural, so don’t judge them. Just let them happen. Once you’ve done that for a bit, or if you start finding it hard to let the feelings and thoughts happen without judgement, let your attention wander again and then come to rest on another thing and quality. Keep going.

All of the principles from the previous chapter still apply, e.g. on how to deal with other thoughts and feelings or with losing focus, and how much time to put in.

The intermediate version

Remember that exercise with the peripheral vision? It can actually serve as a proxy for building the skill of observing in a less focused way: while observing the world around you, put more of your attention on your peripheral vision than you normally would. This will automatically stop you from focusing on a single thing and creates an interesting different quality of awareness. Looking back, it’s hard for me to tell what had the most impact on my learning, but I think this definitely made a significant difference.

What exactly you’re cultivating by doing this is kind of hard to describe. You just have to do it several times (and remember to do it in a “lazy”, relaxed sort of way: it’s totally fine if you have no idea how to even go about it. Just experiment a little and don’t worry if you’re not getting it. Each time you try, it gets a little more likely that it will click next time), and at some point it will start happening.

Don’t go expecting something particularly magical or mind-bending, though… this is still a very natural, normal type of state, just not one you might habitually get into or recognize. In fact, the same is kind of true for all of mindfulness: I can almost guarantee that you’ve been mindful in the past, but sporadically and not on purpose, most likely without even realizing what you were doing. As you get better at this, you might notice some similarities to things you’ve experienced in the past. Only one way to find out!

Opportunities

What I like about this approach is that you can do it at almost any time when you have nothing else to do: while doing mindless chores, while watching TV, while sitting on the bus or train, while walking around, while taking a shower… the possibilities are almost endless. It’s less of a great fit for any situation in which you need to actually focus, though, so I wouldn’t recommend doing this while driving (though at an intermediate level you might be able to) or while doing your taxes or whatever.