Make Yourself Sit

Six simple steps to make sure you get your practice in everyday.

In meditation, we can find peace, happiness, stress-freeness, ease of thought, and ultimately, health and wellness benefits that we all enjoy. The first step, though, is to get a practice going. What are the hindrances to this? And, how can we build something successful that fits our own timelines?

This course will lay out the blueprint for any successful meditation practice which will have you up and running within the first week AND will be simple enough to carry forward into your day-to-day life.

Lección 1: Take Your Seat

Take your seat. Sounds easy enough! but often this is our biggest hurdle to getting in a good sit.
As your practice evolves, you may want to invest in different bells and whistles, cushions and altars, candles, and blankets... but to begin with, and to sustain, you MUST SIT!

This first lesson is something we as experienced yogis and meditators think we can skip. However, the fundamentals of getting your own self into your own seat are a must for your continued success as a meditator.

Lección 2: Relax The Body And Turn Inward

Relaxing the body: In meditation we are taught to practice sitting upright so that the mind/body can learn to be in a relaxed and centered state for the rest of our waking life. Lying down, we are used to letting go, falling asleep, and taking a nap. Meditation is not sleep. It is a very austere practice of awakened awareness that requires us to relax. So we begin by practicing relaxing our body and keeping ourselves alert. As we take time to do this aspect of practice right at the start, we gain immeasurable self-knowledge about ourselves and our physical and neurological habits and work to learn how to help ourselves stay relaxed and find key points that can cue us into our own relaxed state.

Once we have relaxed, we begin to draw our attention inward. This is akin to downshifting a car (a manual transmission if you've ever driven one!). You have to go from gear to gear -- 5th to 4th, 4th to 3rd, and onward to 1st, and finally park. Turning inward, relaxing the body is like this. In steps or phases which help to highlight our ability to be mindful and precise with our attention.

Lección 3: Notice Your Breath

What can be an annoying first teaching is, what is happening with your breath? But! this is a very important skill to build, bit by bit. Once you have taken your seat, relaxed your body and turned your attention inward, it's good to see what's happening with your own breath in this moment. Is it deep or shallow? Is it even or labored? Is it balanced or imabalnced? Taking the time to tune your ability to notice and observe your own breath as it is, is crucial to beginning any other kind of breathwork practice, or meditation dharna (technique) so that you not in resistance to your own state of being.

Lección 4: Practice

Now you're ready to practice!

You can see from the first three steps, that we have some work to do before we engage our minds, bodies, and insights into some sort of technique ready to be used. This is what is the meat of the practice (I'm vegetarian, btw)!

As you can see here on Insight Timer, there are multitudes of types of practices, religions, paths, beliefs, and variations on how to meditate. Here, we begin with a simple practice that could be enough for a year! But, if you like, we can learn more techniques (or, dharans) together, or you can take from your own traditions and studies and put here in this series the "practice" part of the meditation. In so much as this technique is leading you into a state wherein you can BE STILL.

Lección 5: Be Still

We have been building up to this part of the meditation practice in steps 1-4. Now, here at step 5, we get to the part that most people believe is what they should be doing when meditating -- just being still. Nothing happening! However, as we build our stamina and ability to be still, we learn that this is a very fluid state that we can incorporate all of our studies into maintaining. Being still IS THE PRACTICE. But the depth of what stillness is evolved over time and over each individual sits. Again, here is where we gain self-knowledge in understanding our inabilities and weaknesses as a meditator, and our strengths! And, our capacity for nearly limitless growth and expansion of our experience and integration with stillness.

Lección 6: Bring Yourself Back

Once you have had your fill of being still (nice rhyme!), it's time to return to your day. Again, like the car when down-shifting gears, we want to remember to move from our stillness back into gear with some finesse. This is an easy yet often discarded step in the practice of meditation, mainly because, we want to get on with it! But if you think of the gymnast at the Olympics - once they do their incredible floor routine, they can lose their whole perfect 10 if they do not land the trick and stick! So here, at the end of our practice, we take a couple of minutes to reset ourselves back into our activity of the day. Enjoy this! And, now, you can apply all of these steps to your practice and your life every day!

Reviews

I am a relative novice at meditation. I found this course very helpful and instructive. I liked the well thought out steps and the compelling delivery of the teacher, and her vocal quality was engaging and informal. I am inspired to go the next step to improving my practice. Thank you!