I know, I know, to some people the word “meditation” sends shivers down their spin, and they conjure up images of tie dye hippies all sat round chanting, but don’t panic! Meditation is nothing like that (unless you want it to be – I am, I have to admit, a bit of a secret hippy…).

Essentially meditation is about creating mental discipline by which you can get beyond the reflexive, “thinking” mind into a state of relaxation or awareness.

Meditation often involves turning attention to a single point of reference and the easiest point of reference is your breath. The great thing about using your breath as a focus when developing mindfulness is that is always there! So you can do a spot of mindfulness meditation whenever you have a spare few minutes, I often to do whilst stood in a queue waiting for something.

Remember though that mediation is not an end in itself, it is about practicing mindfulness so you can use it all of the time. The secret, really, is to ALWAYS be meditating, and I will get onto that in much more detail in later posts, but right now, I want to talk you through a very basic mindfulness mediation so you can start creating a habit if doing it every day. It is a great habit to get into and you will find, with practice, you will become calmer, more focused and energised is a very short space of time.

To begin with, you only need to dedicate 5 minutes to this and slowly build the time up to 20 – 25 minutes (maybe add a minute a week? There is no rush, it is better to build slowly – those are the most powerful habits).

So, what you do is very simple, you don’t need to get yourself in any complicated posture, or burn incense or anything (although you can if you want to, I find it does help – creating a “ritual” around your practice) just sit in a nice firm chair (not a sofa!), make sure your feet can touch the floor, sit forward a bit on the chair so that you are supporting your own back and it has its natural curve (people often find the correct posture the hardest to create  – listen to the recent podcasts to hear about how to relax, breath and improve your posture), then  just breath! Don’t try and force your breath or change it, just breath. And as you do so, start counting the breath, start at one and go to ten, when you reach ten start at one again (breath in, “one, breath out “two”, etc), if you get distracted by thoughts or whatever, lose count or accidentally go over ten, just draw your attention gently back to your breath and start counting from one again.

Do this for five minutes and see how you get on.

Matt

Mindfulness is about paying attention to the present moment, to do that we need to build our concentration levels; something that is being constantly eroded in our modern society. To build our concentration we need to see how little we have at the moment.

So, just sit down and do nothing. See how long it takes before your mind starts racing with things you really SHOULD be doing instead of being sat there, see how long it takes for you to start getting twitchy and notice itches, aches and pains in your body, before you start becoming bored?

The first stage of Yoga (often the only one we do) is about being able to hold you body still for long periods, it is essential for mindfulness that we still the mind, so that we take our attention outside of our heads and start paying attention to what is out there rather than to our thoughts, ideas and feelings.

So, find yourself a nice quite spot and sit still for 5 minutes. See what happens, pay attention to any thoughts and feelings that arise.

Matt

PS, Lotus position is optional! You can just do it slouched in a chair…

Mindfulness comes from Buddhist philosophy but has been picked up in the last few years by modern western psychology, mainly by someone called Jon Kabat-Zinn. Mindfulness is attracting increasing interest among western clinical psychologists and psychiatrists as a means of dealing with stress, anxiety, and depressive mood states.

But it is not limited to only helping in those conditions, by becoming mindful you will find you will have more energy, concentration, less worries and concerns (therefore more relaxed) and appear to be able to act more spontaneously and relevantly in a given situation (hence increasing your confidence).

So, what is mindfulness?! It is simply paying attention to what we are doing NOW. Very few of us actually pay conscious attention to what we doing.

Our brains are designed to ‘habituate” repeated experience. What this means is when we do something over and over again, we stop paying conscious attention to it and it becomes an automatic unconscious habit.

It is thought that we do this for survival purposes, our conscious minds have limited attention, so our habituation means we stop paying attention to what doesn’t change (we don’t need to) and only pay attention to something that changes (which can mean danger).

But where it works against us is that much our day is spent doing the same things and having the same stimuli. We stop paying attention and start sleepwalking through life. Our lives begin to appear mundane and we yearn for something new to stimulate us.

If we saw a sunrise once in our lifetime we would consider it one of the most beautiful sights we have ever seen, because we see it almost daily, we stop paying attention, we miss the beautiful richness of “every day” life.

Slowing down is about paying attention to that daily richness, to appreciate the beauty that is all around us.

Luckily we are not stuck with the results of our habituation and can reset the process so that we can live richer and fuller lives a process of ‘mindfulness’, or deliberately paying attention to every day habits.

A lot of mindfulness exercises are in the forms of meditation, where we sit and focus on something (often our breathing) for long periods of time. Although this is very, very powerful it can be quite overwhelming for a beginner and the power of mindfulness is to use it every day life, not to be able to sit for hours on end.

So I have developed a series exercises, experiments and activities to help you bring mindfulness into your every day life and start to build towards a meditative practice.

I will begin those exercises tomorrow and run a short series of them for the next few posts.

Matt

I did this for about 3 years but started to find it a real hassle updating the site each day, blogs were becoming more and more popular, so eventually to solve the technical issues, I set up my first blog in 2005, it was just as blogs were starting to seep into the public consciousness. So I have been doing a “daily blog” for about 8 years.

The tricky aspect of getting in the habit of pouring out the secrets of existence every day, with the intent to help as much as possible by promoting the advantages of Slowing Down, and through that gradually developing a bit of a way with words and that combination leading to occasional spurts of eloquence and spot-on-ness that take even me by surprise, when they come as they do out of the blue and then continue beguilingly for a few days or so, is trying to decide what to say. Do I just ramble about what I am up to, what I am thinking and interweave that with an odd slow tip, or do I do a cold and hard “technique” driven blog, with just a tip or a quote each day? What is the level of the people who read this, are they people who are totally new to the Slow Philosophy and trying to figure out what it is all about, or are they already well versed in the art and are looking for little extra hints and tips to improve? So, where do I pitch it? Beginner, or advanced? I hope I get the balance.

I’m only human and sometimes events conspire to denude me of the requisite time and space to apply myself, for believe me, to turn in a decent entry, I really do have to apply myself fully, (not actually being a genius) so there are inevitably times when what I’m writing, while well-meaning and definitely comprising at least one small nugget of something useful, is actually, from an artistic integrity point of view, just a load of old bollocks.

Hopefully this crisis of confidence will be gone soon and normal service will return tomorrow.

Matt