How to meditate for beginners
How to meditate for beginners
How to Start Meditating
This article was co-authored by Soken Graf and by wikiHow staff writer, Christopher M. Osborne, PhD. Soken Graf is a Meditation Coach, Buddhist Priest, Certified Advanced Rolfer, and a Published Author who runs Bodhi Heart Rolfing and Meditation, a spiritual life coaching business based in New York City, New York. Soken has over 25 years of Buddhist training experience and advises entrepreneurs, business owners, designers, and professionals. He has worked with organizations such as the American Management Association as a consultant for training courses on such topics as Mindful Leadership, Cultivating Awareness, and Understanding Wisdom: The Compassionate Principles of Work-Life Balance. In addition to his work as a priest, Soken has certifications in Advanced Rolfing from the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration, Visceral Manipulation, Craniosacral Therapy, SourcePoint Therapy®, and Cold-Laser Therapy.
There are 11 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page.
wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. In this case, 83% of readers who voted found the article helpful, earning it our reader-approved status.
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Meditation is a way to calm the mind and help you focus. It can clear away confusion and make life easier by helping you control feelings, or even get rid of certain unhelpful feelings completely. Some call this accessing your inner calm. There are many ways to improve your mental clarity, reduce anxiety, and access your inner calm through meditation. Whatever your reasons may be for meditating, practicing consistently will help you achieve your desired results and may also provide you with unexpected ones.
How to Meditate
When we meditate, we inject far-reaching and long-lasting benefits into our lives: We lower our stress levels, we get to know our pain, we connect better, we improve our focus, and we’re kinder to ourselves. Let us walk you through the basics in our new mindful guide on how to meditate.
We welcome you to our Mindful guide to meditation, which includes a variety of styles of meditation, information about the benefits of each practice, and free guided audio practices that help you learn how to meditate and incorporate meditation into your daily life. Keep reading to learn more about the basics of this transformative practice that enables us to find more joy in daily living.
What is Meditation?
A brief explanation of the practice.
How do you learn to meditate? In mindfulness meditation, we’re learning how to pay attention to the breath as it goes in and out, and notice when the mind wanders from this task. This practice of returning to the breath builds the muscles of attention and mindfulness.
When we pay attention to our breath, we are learning how to return to, and remain in, the present moment—to anchor ourselves in the here and now on purpose, without judgement.
The idea behind mindfulness seems simple—the practice takes patience. Indeed, renowned meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg recounts that her first experience with meditation showed her how quickly the mind gets caught up in other tasks. “I thought, okay, what will it be, like, 800 breaths before my mind starts to wander? And to my absolute amazement, it was one breath, and I’d be gone,” says Salzberg.
Why Learn to Meditate?
A selection of benefits that are associated with meditating.
While meditation isn’t a cure-all, it can certainly provide some much-needed space in your life. Sometimes, that’s all we need to make better choices for ourselves, our families, and our communities. And the most important tools you can bring with you to your meditation practice are a little patience, some kindness for yourself, and a comfortable place to sit.
When we meditate, we inject far-reaching and long-lasting benefits into our lives. And bonus: you don’t need any extra gear or an expensive membership.
Here are five reasons to meditate:
How to Meditate
Meditation is something everyone can do, here’s how.
Meditation is simpler (and harder) than most people think. Read these steps, make sure you’re somewhere where you can relax into this process, set a timer, and give it a shot:
1) Take a seat
Find place to sit that feels calm and quiet to you.
2) Set a time limit
If you’re just beginning, it can help to choose a short time, such as five or 10 minutes.
3) Notice your body
You can sit in a chair with your feet on the floor, you can sit loosely cross-legged, you can kneel—all are fine. Just make sure you are stable and in a position you can stay in for a while.
4) Feel your breath
Follow the sensation of your breath as it goes in and as it goes out.
5) Notice when your mind has wandered
Inevitably, your attention will leave the breath and wander to other places. When you get around to noticing that your mind has wandered—in a few seconds, a minute, five minutes—simply return your attention to the breath.
6) Be kind to your wandering mind
Don’t judge yourself or obsess over the content of the thoughts you find yourself lost in. Just come back.
7) Close with kindness
When you’re ready, gently lift your gaze (if your eyes are closed, open them). Take a moment and notice any sounds in the environment. Notice how your body feels right now. Notice your thoughts and emotions.
That’s it! That’s the practice. You focus your attention, your mind wanders, you bring it back, and you try to do it as kindly as possible (as many times as you need to).
How Much Should I Meditate?
Meditation is no more complicated than what we’ve described above. It is that simple … and that challenging. It’s also powerful and worth it. The key is to commit to sit every day, even if it’s for five minutes. Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg says: “One of my meditation teachers said that the most important moment in your meditation practice is the moment you sit down to do it. Because right then you’re saying to yourself that you believe in change, you believe in caring for yourself, and you’re making it real. You’re not just holding some value like mindfulness or compassion in the abstract, but really making it real.”
Recent research from neuroscientist Amishi Jha discovered that 12 minutes of meditation, 5 days a week can protect and strengthen your ability to pay attention.
Meditation Tips and Techniques
We’ve gone over the basic breath meditation so far, but there are other mindfulness techniques that use different focal points than the breath to anchor our attention—external objects like a sound in the room, or something broader, such as noticing spontaneous things that come into your awareness during an aimless wandering practice. But all of these practices have one thing in common: We notice that our minds ARE running the show a lot of the time. It’s true. We think thoughts, typically, and then we act. But here are some helpful strategies to change that up:
How to Make Mindfulness a Habit
It’s estimated that 95% of our behavior runs on autopilot. That’s because neural networks underlie all of our habits, reducing our millions of sensory inputs per second into manageable shortcuts so we can function in this crazy world. These default brain signals are so efficient that they often cause us to relapse into old behaviors before we remember what we meant to do instead.
Mindfulness is the exact opposite of these default processes. It’s executive control rather than autopilot, and enables intentional actions, willpower, and decisions. But that takes practice. The more we activate the intentional brain, the stronger it gets. Every time we do something deliberate and new, we stimulate neuroplasticity, activating our grey matter, which is full of newly sprouted neurons that have not yet been groomed for “autopilot” brain.
But here’s the problem. While our intentional brain knows what is best for us, our autopilot brain causes us to shortcut our way through life. So how can we trigger ourselves to be mindful when we need it most? This is where the notion of “behavior design” comes in. It’s a way to put your intentional brain in the driver’s seat. There are two ways to do that—first, slowing down the autopilot brain by putting obstacles in its way, and second, removing obstacles in the path of the intentional brain, so it can gain control.
Shifting the balance to give your intentional brain more power takes some work, though. Here are some ways to get started.
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How to meditate: The beginner’s guide to building a meditation habit and practicing mindfulness
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In the US, the amount of people practicing meditation more than tripled from 2012 to 2017.
While meditation has a rich cultural history in countries like India, China, and Japan, it’s becoming increasingly popular in the Western world — and with good reason.
Meditation can have extensive mental and physical health benefits, and you need less than 10 minutes alone each day to do it. It might seem difficult to get started and keep up a routine, but the following guide breaks it down for beginners.
What is meditation?
Meditation isn’t about learning how to empty your mind or stop your thoughts. Instead, meditation is the practice of training your attention and focus from a place of non-judgement.
Mindfulness meditation is the most common type of meditation in the West — and perhaps the easiest one to start. Mindfulness has to do with paying attention to what you’re feeling and observing in the present moment.
Note: It’s important to recognize that meditation and mindfulness are not one in the same.
If the main idea of meditation is to be present and aware of your thoughts and feelings, mindfulness is the ongoing practice of honing that awareness and reconnecting to what we do and why we do it.
For example, if you’re totally immersed in a single task, and not thinking about the past or imagining the future, you’re being mindful. Or, if you go for a walk and feel lost in nature, becoming attuned to the chirping birds or falling leaves, you’re also being mindful. In other words: meditation isn’t the only way to be mindful.
On the other hand, meditation is the intentional practice of mindfulness. Instead of focusing on nature or a specific task, you’re focusing on each inhale and exhale of your breathing. This type of mindful breathing is an important and useful way to anchor your focus in the present moment.
How to meditate
To learn how to meditate effectively, it’s helpful to have some guidance. Click to play our audio meditation guides in the background as you start your practice. Try the two-minute meditation first, and once you feel comfortable, try the five-minute and 10-minute meditations.
2-minute guided meditation
5-minute guided meditation
10-minute guided meditation
Note: These guided meditations were created exclusively for Insider by Diana Winston, the director of mindfulness education at UCLA’s Mindfulness Awareness Research Center. To access more free guided meditations from UCLA, visit the website or download the UCLA Mindful App.
Mindfulness meditation can be done anywhere that you can focus. Here are a few steps to help you meditate:
Meditating for just five to 10 minutes each day is an achievement to be proud of. Some people like to meditate for as long as 30 minutes to 45 minutes once they become more experienced, but there are benefits even with short amounts of practice.
Building a meditation habit
Building a meditation habit is important if you want to gain all the benefits that the practice has to offer.
Meditate at the same time daily
If possible, try to meditate at the same time every day, as this will help you build a habit so you build meditation into your daily schedule. And if you have to skip a day for whatever reason, don’t be too hard on yourself — just try to get back to your routine the next day.
Some people choose to meditate every morning, right after they wake up. Morning meditation is a staple of some successful entrepreneurs’ schedules, and it can help improve your focus and clarity for the day ahead.
Others choose to meditate right before they go to sleep, as it can promote relaxation and help your drift off easier. Meditation for sleep is a bit different than in the day, as you normally wouldn’t want to fall asleep as a result of your practice.
In a 2021 study of meditation app users, researchers found that people who used the app at the same time every day were more likely to continue using the meditation app.
The research also suggested that establishing the habit of using the app at the same time every day may have made the act of meditation easier and more beneficial for people, since they could focus all their cognitive resources on the meditation, rather than making the time or space meditate.
Quick tip: Make a note of when and where you will meditate. This can help hack your brain into making the behavior habitual. It can also help to pair the habit with another habit you already do every day — such as brewing your coffee.
Create an ideal space for meditation
As James Clear writes in his book Atomic Habits, making the desired habit visible while removing any obstacles in your environment is an important tool for forming the habit. So if you want to form a meditation practice, create an environment associated with meditation.
Maybe you have a meditation room or nook that’s free from distractions such as your phone or television, with a comfortable seat or cushion for meditating. Each time you meditate, do it here.
Make meditating easy
Another way to help yourself build a desired habit is to make the habit easy. Meditating for more than 10 minutes might seem like a challenge at first, but meditating for two minutes while you wait for your coffee to brew is much more doable.
Keep doing this every day, and you might find that you’ve formed a habit. Now you can try increasing the amount of time you spend meditating.
Quick tip: You may prefer a specific posture for meditation, depending on the time of day or your physical condition. While most people sit for meditation, you can also lie down, kneel, or stand — just make sure your position is comfortable and you’re able to stay focused.
Meditation types and techniques
On top of your basic mindfulness practice, there are many other different types of meditation you can try.
While all these forms of meditation incorporate some aspects of mindfulness, they also offer participants an alternative anchor of focus during meditation. Here’s how:
Body scan meditation
During a body scan meditation, you’ll be focusing on bodily sensations, as opposed to just your breath.
For example, you can start at your toes, and take a few moments to focus on how they feel when they’re grounded on the floor. Then, move through your legs, chest, arms, shoulders, neck, and head, slowly noticing the sensations of each body part.
Body scan meditation can be especially useful for reducing chronic pain or dealing with tension, stress, or trauma.
Loving kindness meditation
With loving kindness meditation, the aim is to direct feelings of compassion towards yourself and others.
It’s easy to add this on to any basic mindfulness meditation. For example, instead of just focusing on your breath, try thinking about someone else in your head. Then, say this phrase aloud: «May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe.»
You can direct these positive thoughts toward yourself, someone you love, or someone you don’t particularly like at the moment. In fact, loving kindness meditation has been found to help improve self-esteem and even resolve conflicts.
Walking meditation
During walking meditation, you’ll focus on each step as you mindfully lift and place your foot on the ground. You can walk anywhere — a hallway inside, a sidewalk in the city, or out in a park.
Quick tip: Walking meditation may be worth trying if you don’t like sitting still for a traditional mindfulness meditation. It offers the same advantages of meditation — plus the health benefits of walking.
Benefits of meditation
Research has found that meditation can improve your mental and physical health in a variety of ways.
Here are seven science-backed benefits of meditation:
Managing common meditation struggles
Here are five common issues you may experience when meditating — and how to work through them.
Not having time to meditate: Start small. You don’t have to block out 30 minutes each day for meditation. Challenge yourself to meditate for one or two minutes at first.
Not being able to quiet your thoughts: Luckily, the point of meditation is not to completely clear all your thoughts. Rather, it’s about noticing them in a non-judging way. Rather than focusing on clearing away all thoughts, become aware of each one, then try to bring your focus back to your breath. You can also try transcendental meditation, where you repeat a mantra that helps you quiet other thoughts.
Not being able to sit still: Don’t give up on meditating because you struggle to stay in the lotus position for more than a few minutes. Try a different type of meditation that allows for movement, such as a walking meditation.
Experiencing pain or other uncomfortable feelings during meditation: Meditation exercises, like the body scan, can help control pain. And, mindfulness meditation is associated with helping regulate pain. But what if pain or discomfort is distracting you during meditation?
First, make sure that you’re in a comfortable position that won’t cause unnecessary pain. Use meditation to familiarize yourself with the pain. Acknowledge it, and observe the pain and any related thoughts or feelings, then breathe through it.
Mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young writes that, when you experience discomfort during meditation, noticing the judgements and the resulting tensions around the pain, then dropping them, can help you better manage it. By softening your resistance to the pain, you teach your mind a healthier way of dealing with it.
Meditation isn’t meeting your expectations: Meditation is a practice, and it takes time to see the benefits. If you’re having trouble sticking with the practice, look into different forms of meditation, or try some of the habit-forming tips above to help you establish the practice.
Best meditation apps
Guided meditation is great for beginners and experts. svetikd/Getty Images To help you get started with meditation, try some of the best meditation apps that we tested and recommend:
Insider’s takeaway
Meditation is the practice of being in the present moment and fostering an awareness of your thoughts and feelings while anchoring yourself in your breathing. Meditation goes hand in hand with mindfulness, or the awareness of your senses in the moment.
There are different types of meditation to experiment with, such as loving kindness meditations that focus on gratitude, and walking meditations that are grounded in movement.
The practice of meditation is associated with better focus, reduced stress, and better pain management. To experience all the benefits of meditation, it’s important to make it a habit.
The easiest way to start meditating is to start small — for a few minutes — in a space without distractions. It may help to use a meditation app or guided meditation.
We may receive a commission when you buy through our links, but our reporting and recommendations are always independent and objective.
How to Meditate
Here are the basics of mindfulness meditation in 3 simple steps:
Sit comfortably and close your eyes.
The third step is the biggie. As soon as you try to do this, Your mind is probably going to go nuts. You’re going to start thinking: What’s for lunch? Do I need a haircut? Why do celebrities marry other celebrities?
This is totally normal. All of our minds are a bit crazy. No big deal. As soon as you notice your mind has wandered, just return your attention to the breath.
Want to give it a try? Here’s a quick video where we guide you in a 90 second practice.
If you’re looking to give meditation a try, beyond the 90 seconds you just did in this video, download the Ten Percent Happier app from the Apple app store or Google Play today.
Why Meditate
Ok, now that you’ve got a handle on basic meditation techniques, let’s review some of the science. In recent years, there’s been an explosion of research into the physiological and psychological benefits of meditation. It’s been to shown to:
Lower your blood pressure
Reduce the release of the stress hormone cortisol
Boost your immune system
Slow age-related atrophy of the brain
Mitigate anxiety and depression
Improve focus and productivity
The science is still in its early stages and findings are preliminary. We worry that it has provoked a certain amount of irrational exuberance in the media, which has also ignited a fair share of backlash, but here’s what we can safely say: the studies strongly suggest that a few minutes of daily meditation can deliver a long list of tantalizing health benefits.
These long-term health benefits can get you motivated to learn how to meditate, but it takes a more immediate benefit to keep you going. So, let’s talk about perhaps the most powerful benefits of meditation: the oft-used but ill-defined word ‘mindfulness’.
Finding Time for Meditation
Dan Harris meditating in Time Square. (Kind of ridiculous we know, but yes, you can practice pretty much anywhere)
We’ve covered basic meditation instructions, but it’s wise to acknowledge the big challenge for most of us: How can we find the time? People tell us all the time: I get it, I know meditation is good for you, but I just can’t get find the time to do it. Even some of the most successful people we know tell us this.
It’s like the gym. We all know the benefits of working out, but it takes some serious dedication to actually build exercise into our lives.
Here are some tricks for building meditation into a super busy life:
First, you can meditate pretty much anywhere. Don’t get fixated on finding the perfect, pristine, quiet place. You can meditate in a Uber, in your office, in parks, on planes, and while waiting for your toddler to fall asleep.
Second, you don’t need to be obsessive about meditating at a particular time of day. You may find a regular time slot, and that’s great. But if you have an unpredictable schedule, just fit it in when you can. If you’re not a morning person, don’t force yourself to do it right after you wake up. Experiment a bit and find something that works. A daily reminder can be useful, and you can set one up in the 10% Happier app.
Third, give yourself a break. Type A people often dive into meditation with lots of lofty ambitions, and then when they fall off the wagon for a few days, the voice in their heads starts telling them a story about how they are failed meditators. Totally untrue. When you fall off the wagon, just begin again. Nothing’s been lost. It’s like when you get distracted during meditation itself: just begin again.
And here’s our final tip: perhaps the most powerful method for sustaining my meditation practice is to really notice the benefits as they show up in your actual life. Is meditation making you 10% less likely to pop off at your boss? Notice that. Is it making you 10% less likely to overeat? Give yourself credit. The more you pay attention to the wins, the more likely you are to continue to practice meditation.
Don’t make the mistake of expecting instant transformation. It’s like those erectile dysfunction ads. If you experience a state of cosmic bliss or boundless compassion that lasts more than four hours, call your physician.
Getting Started
You now have the basic instructions for beginning a meditation practice. Just as in physical exercise though, it can be useful to have more guidance as you get going.
That’s why we built the Ten Percent Happier app. What we’ve done is brought together the smartest, coolest, funniest meditation teachers and putting them all together in one place. We’ll help you take meditation out of the realm of being a chore, one more thing on your to-do list. We are aiming to make this a great part of your life.
So if you want to join, we’d love to have you at the party. Download the app today and start learning how to meditate from some of the best teachers in the world.
How to Meditate for Self Discovery
This article was co-authored by Soken Graf. Soken Graf is a Meditation Coach, Buddhist Priest, Certified Advanced Rolfer, and a Published Author who runs Bodhi Heart Rolfing and Meditation, a spiritual life coaching business based in New York City, New York. Soken has over 25 years of Buddhist training experience and advises entrepreneurs, business owners, designers, and professionals. He has worked with organizations such as the American Management Association as a consultant for training courses on such topics as Mindful Leadership, Cultivating Awareness, and Understanding Wisdom: The Compassionate Principles of Work-Life Balance. In addition to his work as a priest, Soken has certifications in Advanced Rolfing from the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration, Visceral Manipulation, Craniosacral Therapy, SourcePoint Therapy®, and Cold-Laser Therapy.
There are 10 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page.
wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. In this case, 89% of readers who voted found the article helpful, earning it our reader-approved status.
This article has been viewed 103,611 times.
When you’re looking for ways to get to know the “true you,” meditation is a powerful practice of mindfulness you can try to help you along your path to self-discovery. In general, meditation promotes self-discovery by letting you focus all your attention inwards and blocking out external distractions. Once you’re looking inwards there are certain ways you can focus your mediation sessions that can help you get closer to your true self. Follow the steps on this list to give it a shot!