Meditation

Why choose meditation as the first post? It’s a cornerstone of everything in life. I now find that meditation or little moments of mindfulness have permeated my daily life.

I’ve started meditation around 2014. After 10 years since the beginning I’m only an intermediate meditator at best. My practice had been intermittent, but in more recent years, I started practicing more consistency: at least 10 minutes each day, sometimes 20-30 minutes over 2-3 sessions in a day.

Why Meditate

Meditation can bring benefits across many aspects in life. It’s also useful for making yourself a calmer, happier person. It cultivates the good qualities of your mind while taming the bad ones. Moreover, it strengthens the mind like building a muscle, preparing yo for the toughness in work and life.

From my own experience, it benefits in the following ways:

• Building Self-awareness. It allows us to see our own emotions and thinking patterns more clearly. Understanding our worries, frustrations, interests, and excitements. Awareness can be uncomfortable at times - I often find myself way too identified with work, which I had to learn to accept for now and slowly change, but knowing is better than not.

• Bringing mental clarity and strength. This can be practically useful in the stressful tech industry. The exercise of directing our attention back to a specific object, or being aware but not reactive to emotional states, is essential when participating in meetings or heated debates. It allows one to focus on the subject without being swayed away by emotions or other distractions.

• Cultivating good habits. Non-reactivity, patience come more naturally as I exercise more. Some types of meditations also promote kind thoughts - generosity, empathy and compassion, allow them to occur more often throughout the day. A quote from Joseph Goldstein: “The deepest desire of us all is perfecting the qualities of our heart and mind”, and meditation is undoubtedly an effective way to do so.

• Taming the bad habits. Many moments when I was just about to get frustrated or angry towards any person - a co-worker, a family or even sometimes my child when she is too spoiled, the exercise of seeing the anger in a non-reactive way and let it pass often makes the situations better. Restraining from checking the phone, or eating sweets can also become easier.

• Benefits in the moments. A single out breath can let go of your negative thoughts in the moment. A 3-minute breathing in between meetings can reset the mind. A 10-minute meditation before bed can bring deeper sleep, etc. These are just few of examples of the many occasions meditation/mindfulness brings immediate benefit.

The ultimately purpose of meditation is not to feel better in the moment or right after. Rather, it is cultivating the habit of mindfulness, defined as the moment-to-moment awareness of the present, in a non-reactive, nonjudgemental way, so one can navigate the deep currents of life more skillfully, and lead to a happier life.

How to meditate

Simplest ways to start is sitting for ten minutes or so, with eyes closed. Sit straight and stay alert. Tuck the chin slightly. During meditation, try to keep the focus of attention on the breath, notice the sensations of the breath at the nostril, follow through from the very beginning to the very end of each breath, then the next breath. Your mind might start to wander, when you notice it, congratulate your self for waking up, and then gently pull your attention back to the breath. This simple exercise can be called “Breath Focus”.

After focusing on the breath for a while, broaden your awareness to other senses. Notice what other sensations are present, notice your primary feeling tone (pleasant, unpleasant or neutral), sounds, thoughts, body sensations, emotions. Keep noticing without getting caught up in them. This can be referred to as “Open Awareness” meditation.

There are more advance types, “Body Scan”, “Noting”, or “Loving kindness meditation”, “Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation”, etc..

These techniques can be better explained by books. I recommend “Mindfulness: A practical guide to peace in a frantic world By Prof Mark William" for beginners, and “Insight Meditation by Joseph Goldstein" for those who are more advanced.

One possible downside of sitting meditation is that it can “suppress energy”. When in a low mood or experiencing low energy, setting yet another 10 minutes might make it worse. Instead, walking meditation works better. It’s the same exercise except one is walking rather than sitting. When walking, pay attention to sensations in your foot or other parts of the body, or feeling the breath, or keep notice of the sceneries that you see. Just don’t get lost in thoughts.

Meditation doesn’t have to be a formal exercise. Many mindful moments in the daily life can accumulate and yield similar benefits. For instance, when waiting in line, cultivate patience by taking a few deep breaths instead of checking on phone.

Apps

Lastly, here are a few apps that I find helpful:

FitMind - This is my favorite. It guides you through different kinds of meditation exercises from beginner to more advanced levels, with well structured content and clean interface.

Soundcloud - Many excellent guided meditations can be found here, like this track from the book mentioned above. And it’s completely free.

Headspace - Offers numerous high-quality guided meditations.

Calm - I started with Calm but now uses it less often. I find the rich UX and contents to be overwhelming at times. Nevertheless, it’s useful especially when meditating while listening to a specific topic.