Meditation Page by Page

This is everything obviously relevant I know about meditation. This is meant to be a guide to the kind of meditation that improves concentration, executive function, and sleep. I believe that breath-focused zen meditation is the best kind of meditation for that. The essence of zen meditation is to concentrate, and think about, your breathing and nothing else. This is tougher than it sounds!

But after each session, you get the strange feeling that the world is brand new, you can concentrate better, and you feel a powerful sense of joy. That’s what I’m sure you’ll enjoy once you’ve practiced enough.

Things you’ll want to memorize are indicated by bold text.

Many books claim that your posture is irrelevant when meditating. This is not the case, from my experience. Better postures will likely let you achieve greater results, better concentration, and less discomfort. The more advanced my posture, the better things got. Going from half-lotus to full-lotus dramatically improved my practice. I will focus on the full-lotus; eventually, you’ll probably be flexible enough, and I don’t have much experience with anything else.

Entering full-lotus requires quite impressive external hip rotation. Test this by standing up, lifting one of your knees in line with your hips, keeping your knee still using your hand, and rotating at the knee joint in the direction of your other leg. Personally, I am barely flexible enough for full lotus, and I can rotate my knee joints just slightly less than 90 degrees in the direction of the opposite leg.

The stretch I used to get this flexible is super-simple: first, I sit on my meditation pillow. Then, I place one foot against my hip-bone. Finally, I rotate my knee joint as far anti-clockwise as I can, flexing my thighs, for 30 seconds per side. I did this a total of 3 times per leg; a 3-minute stretching routine, quite sufficient for my purposes. Once you’re flexible enough, meditate in the full-lotus pose, described as follows:

Meditation is best done in the full-lotus pose. The full-lotus pose consists of placing each foot on the opposite thigh, so that it rests on the thigh and touches the hip bones.

Your back should be straight, but not perfectly so. After sitting on your pillow, shift your back forwards and backwards until you feel like gravity is pulling you as little as possible.

Your neck, like everything else, should be straight, but not too straight. You should move your neck so your eyes look 30cm ahead of you.

Being flexible enough to sit in full lotus is brainless; entering the right mindset to enjoy sitting still in total silence with your eyes closed is quite cerebral. Meditation books make this much more fun, turning meditation into something enjoyable to look forward to. In particular, Zen Meditation in Plain English, Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness, Master Dogen’s Zazen Meditation Handbook and The Mind Illuminated were extremely helpful in making meditation a fun experience for me, making each meditation session into something fun that I looked forward to.

There’s a 5-step recipe I follow, that helps me achieve a deep level of meditation when meditating:

There are other, subtler things that also help me avoid distraction and enter deep concentration during my meditation sessions; think of these once you’re deep enough into meditating that you’re mostly thinking of your breathing, step 4 or 5 on the previous list:

Changing posture gently and slightly; this often ends in me finding a way to relax and concentrate much better.
Light in the room provides more stimulus and more energy; it’s better to meditate with the lights on.
"Flexing" your mind, concentrate intensely, as if you’re doing a math test.
Enjoying the silence, finding a way to relax when taking a respite from stimulation and excitement.
Accepting fleeting thoughts. Especially in the shallower stages of meditation, you should let thoughts just go away by themselves.
Having your closed eyes looking upwards, taking you back when getting distracted.
Snapping a finger next to your ear when you’ve totally lost your concentration.

Mindset is important, and reading books on meditation helps make it more fun. There really is no better way of improving your concentration and having longer sessions than entering the right mental state through reading about meditation. The best way to find tons of books relating to a subject is Librarything. Here’s a link to all books in the meditation category on Librarything; the more of these you read, the more fun and more helpful meditating gets for you.

Meditation Category on Librarything