Meditation Without Bullshit

by Aaron S Elias

  Before you start, please set an alarm clock. This is necessary because you will find it very difficult to judge the amount of time that has passed. It will also hopefully prevent you from entering a thought-loop that circles around the questions of how much time has passed already or how much time is left. Setting the alarm should make you certain that this issue has been taken care of, allowing you to fully focus on meditation.

  I advise you to stick to two-minute meditation sessions for at least one week. Pushing yourself too hard too soon is a recipe for failure, and we do not want you to feel burnt out from meditating for half an hour or more just because you wanted to prove to yourself that you can meditate for that long. The discomfort of such a long meditation session would likely be very unpleasant for you and make you not want to pursue meditation further.

  Another benefit of sticking to two minutes at first is that you cannot possibly have a rational reason not to do it. I don't care how busy you claim your life is — you surely can spare two minutes out of twenty-four hours. You may even fit two short sessions into your busy day, one after getting get up and another one before going to bed.

  Apart from the minor discomfort due to having to sit still for two minutes, which surely feels like torture to some people, the much bigger challenge is controlling your thoughts. You will notice that it is not that easy to just sit down and not think of anything. All kinds of thoughts, often unresolved issues, will crop up. If you are more pragmatic, you may even wonder when the alarm you set is eventually going to go off. After all, if you do not do anything besides sitting on the floor, perceived time can pass very slowly, turning two minutes into a seemingly much longer period of time. In any case, you should not feel surprised if you already felt a bit calmer after meditating for just two minutes.

  Try it!

  Armed with the information you have received so far, I want you to put this book down and meditate for two minutes. Now! If that is not possible, for instance, because you sit on the bus or train or because your manager should believe that you are working, then please do so at a time that is more suitable for you and do not read on. Otherwise, find a quiet place, set a timer, and go ahead. Sit down and close your eyes. Just try it, even if you think you are not ready yet and should read more about meditation. It will neither be as difficult nor as easy as you expect it to be. Please do not continue reading this book before having done so, as we are going to look at some of your experiences.

  Turn this page over when you are ready.

  You have now meditated for two minutes, or you have disregarded my advice. If it is the latter, then I would like to let you know that you would get a lot more out of the current section of this book if you had meditated. From now on I assume that you did indeed just meditate for two minutes.

  So, how do you feel now? Probably you feel refreshed. I am more interested in how you experienced your brief meditation session, though. Most likely, as soon as you closed your eyes, mental images popped up. Maybe you remembered something someone said or something you should do. In any case, it is likely that random thoughts entered your mind. People do not often seem to encounter abstract thoughts during their meditations. Sure, you may get inspiration for a report or presentation you have been working on or some other problem that occupies your mind most of the day, but that is rather the exception than the rule. Instead, people much more often encounter thoughts about the present, past, or future. Those are often trivial thoughts, too.

  An example of a thought regarding the present can be as banal as remembering that you have to buy soap because you are about to run out of it. This is just a silly example. It does not matter what kind of thought enters your mind. Just try to let it go. The last thing you want to do is to hold on to a particular thought so that you can make a note once the timer has gone off. You may also feel the urge to engage your thoughts further. For instance, if it occurred to you that you really need to get some soap, the next obvious step may be to go through all the items in your household, think of which ones need to be replenished and mentally create a shopping list while meditating. Well, why don't you just visualize the trip to the supermarket or convenience store right afterwards? This is obviously an exaggeration. The point is that eventually you will have to stop engaging your thoughts. You are better off doing so right away.

  More meaningful might be memories of past experiences. This may include happy memories but you could also get confronted with memories of traumatic experiences. Consequently, it is not always pleasant to meditate. Yet, you will learn to face your demons and you will personally grow as a consequence. I will later on discuss in more detail how to deal with such thoughts. It is not based on blocking them, but by resolving the issues that cause them. Meditation may even put your psychoanalyst out of his job.

  Lastly, there is the issue of uncertain future events. But since neither you nor me nor anybody else seems to have a working crystal ball, thinking excessively about the future is, for the very most part, unproductive. This may refer to pleasant as well as unpleasant situations. Maybe you want to ask your boss for a raise, but never dare to. Someday you hopefully will, but now it has been six months already and the time has never been right. Or you want to ask a cute girl out on a date and you know if you do not act soon, somebody else invariably will. Maybe you have a tendency to plan everything ahead and you subconsciously know that you cannot consider all eventualities. This is something people have to learn to accept.

  In general, random thoughts tend to be an expression of an unorganized life. This is especially true if those random thoughts do not disappear as you gain more practice with meditation. I will later on discuss what I call mental hygiene, which entails keeping your mind uncluttered. Most of those tips take little time or effort to implement, but will improve your life dramatically.

  Meditation and Sleep Deprivation

  Meditating for even just two minutes can teach you a lot about yourself. I have already discussed symptoms of a restless mind, but there is also feedback from your body. I have frequently witnessed that people who are under a lot of stress and lack rest sometimes fall asleep during even a very brief meditation session. You should not be too surprised if that happens to you. However, if your alarm clock woke you up at the end of what was supposed to be a meditation session, then your body gave you an important warning sign. It is quite obvious that you should grant yourself more time to rest and recover. The last thing you should skimp on is the quality and quantity of your sleep.

  Contrary to what some people believe, the time you spend sleeping is not wasted. In an ideal world you would not even need an alarm clock, but instead go to bed when you feel tired and get up only after you have naturally woken up. There cannot be enough sleep, unlike some people claim. I refer to actual sleep, not time idled away lying in bed after waking up. There are outlandish but allegedly scientific claims according to which you shorten your expected lifespan if you sleep too much. The studies I read on that topic all seemed to be deficient in one way or another. I would not be surprised, as it is the case in many other fields of science, if industry-funded research was to blame for such results. Do not call me a conspiracy theorist, but just consider this possibility: If it turned out that people needed more than eight hours of sleep to fully recover, don't you think that labor unions or possibly even human rights organizations would put pressure on politicians to reduce working hours?

  Not many people have the freedom to go to bed and rise whenever they feel like. Yet, with some discipline you should be able to get enough sleep every day. If this means that you need to cut down on some of your hobbies or the time you spend consuming media, then so be it. As long as you have a hard time not falling asleep when meditating, you have a deficiency in that regard. If you took care of that problem, then it would not only be easier for you to properly meditate — this is the least of the benefits of getting proper rest — you would also greatly improve your quality of life.

  Getting Started for Real

  S
tarting With Meditation

  Meditating for two minutes is just to get you started. Your goal should be to meditate once or twice a day. Make it a habit, not unlike brushing your teeth! First, you need to get used to meditating for two minutes. This should not take you more than about a week or two. Afterwards, increase the duration of your meditation sessions to a longer interval. I recommend five minutes. The mid- to long-term goal is to further increase the time interval, first to ten and afterwards to fifteen minutes.

  Once you are able to comfortably meditate for fifteen minutes, you will likely hit a sweet spot, meaning that the amount of time you invest and the benefits you reap are in a highly favorable relation to each other. Just like with everything else in life, there are diminishing returns, and they kick in quickly. While gurus may make vague claims about the endless depths of meditation and blather on about all the insights that await you, if you only followed their school and transferred a fraction of your income to their bank account every month, the reality is that there is a limit to how much you arguably would want to relax anyway. Relaxation and mental clarity are both a means to an end, after all. On the other hand, meditating for hours a day is an end all by itself, and one of dubious value. Instead, set a limit and stick to it.

  For at least half a year, I recommend meditating with a timer. Ideally, there are little or no distractions around when you meditate. This means that you will find it next to impossible to gauge how much time has passed. A similar phenomenon occurs after you turn off the light and want to fall asleep but can't. In such a situation, it is equally difficult to accurately guess how much time has passed. It may be a lot less than you think, but you could just as well underestimate how much time has passed. With meditation, taking a break and checking the time is highly counterproductive, so you will be much better off delegating timekeeping to an alarm clock.

  A timer is also necessary to help you build discipline. Especially as you learn to reach deeper meditative states, you can easily lose track of time, which can go both ways. Just as you probably do not want to get up after five minutes, which may feel like half an hour, so you similarly also do not want to lose yourself in meditation. There is very little risk of that happening when you are starting out, but once you are able to sit in the lotus position comfortably, you may end up spending an hour or more meditating, even if you did not intend to do so. For that reason, I still use a timer, even after more than two decades of meditation.

  Being in a prolonged deep meditative state will easily make you lose track of time. Experiencing this once or twice is a worthwhile experience, even if only for the insight that there are diminishing returns in meditation. Those diminishing returns may very well be due to external constraints as you have something else to do than accidentally meditating for hours. I am not saying that you should not explore meditation. However, the focus of Meditation Without Bullshit is on integrating meditation into your daily life instead of making it the center of it.

  Speaking of the duration of meditation sessions, you will probably realize after a few months that a regimen that consists of no more than a daily five or ten-minute session is sufficient to reach a level of mental clarity you once thought impossible to achieve. Later on, I will discuss meditative states, and one aspect is that the more experienced you are, the quicker you reach a certain meditative state. This means that an advanced practitioner reaches a deeper state after one minute than a novice would after even one hour, if he could only sit for that long.

  Breathing

  Many people breathe in a shallow manner. Their short breaths increase their heartbeat and possibly even make them anxious. Then again, I might be mixing up cause and effect. Yet, for meditation you have to breathe deeply. Once you have gotten used to breathing that way, you might want to make it your default way of breathing. Long deep breaths have a calming effect all by itself, which you will notice once you deliberately breathe this way in your daily life. As opposed to shallow, short breaths, long, deep breaths supply you with more oxygen. I think it is a more natural way of breathing.

  This may have sounded somewhat abstract. In short, shallow breathing means that you draw air into your chest. If you do not breathe this way, try it out for a little bit. To me, it feels quite uncomfortable. It is almost anxiety-inducing. Deep breathing, on the other hand, makes use of your diaphragm. To practice it, either sit down on a chair without using the backrest or stand up and put your hands on your ribcage. Then breathe deeply with your diaphragm instead of into your chest. Shallow breathing lifts your chest, while diaphragmatic breathing expands your midriff. This probably looks less impressive on the beach when you are about to hit on the ladies, but it is a more wholesome way of breathing.

  After breathing out, there is a short pause, which happens naturally. Take another breath when your body triggers it and do not interfere with the breathing cycle too much. The goal is to let it happen. I suggest that you try to adopt this as your standard method of breathing. It might take you a few days if you are not used to engaging your diaphragm while breathing as it takes time to change a habit. After about one week you should have become accustomed to it.

  One aspect that is sometimes stressed is to focus on your breathing while meditating. I view this as a crutch. People focus on their breathing because they do not want to experience the restlessness of their mind. By doing so, they cheat themselves out of many of the positive aspects of meditation. If you find it difficult to make it through a few minutes of meditation, then focusing on your breathing may be excusable. However, you should stop doing so sooner rather than later as it will only impede your progress. Focusing on your breathing can be a helpful crutch when starting out. I will discuss this issue in more detail further below.

  Meditation and Your Daily Life

  I find it irritating how meditation is normally marketed in the West. Often, the focus is on a full-time professional guru who is presented as an ideal worthy of emulation. Of course, you, the target of such marketing, are likely not active in the guru business yourself. You cannot sit back and enjoy life without any perturbations. Part of modern life in the West, for better or worse, consists of juggling many responsibilities, such as your job, relationship, children, and hobbies. If you cut out all of that, you are not left with a lot. Fake gurus are aware of that, too. In the extreme, they sell their disciples New Age doctrines, but privately maintain a fleet of Rolls-Royce limousines and a small army of mistresses.

  Meditation is a great tool for relaxation. Yet, it is not a panacea. No matter what you do, you will not be able to eliminate all sources of stress and uncertainty from your life, simply because, as the trite saying goes, no man is an island. There is too much that is out of your control. In this context, I would like to briefly address two common misguided beliefs, which are frequently exploited by shady businessmen. First, as much as you may think your job constrains you and keeps you from reaching your goals, whatever they may be, working for yourself is by no means a solution to that problem. Building a business that runs itself is no small feat, and if it was that easy to do, competition would spring up quickly and go after your piece of the pie. Also, you are likely to work a lot harder than you would sitting in your comfortable office chair. Of course, I am painting with very broad strokes, but if you wanted an easy ride, you are a lot better off putting in your time at work in exchange for a steady paycheck. Second, there is the financial independence crock that has been making the rounds. At the time of writing, we have had many years of zero-interest rate policies. Yet, the financial independence crowd is unperturbed. A consequence of zero-interest rate policies, though, is that stable returns are nowadays very difficult to achieve. There are asset bubbles everywhere you look, yet people think the party will just keep going. It will, but only until the next bubble bursts.

  Realistically, you are stuck on the same treadmill as most everyone else. Yet, meditation can help you lead a more fulfilled life. Sure, reevaluate some of your goals, particularly if your health is sufferi
ng. If you bought this book because you wanted to squeeze more productivity out of your day, then the answer is that you need to get rid of some of your responsibilities because if you do not get enough rest, do not allow yourself some time to recharge, and neglect your health, then thinking that a few minutes of meditation will do the trick would be severely misguided.

  One Thought Begets Another

  It is much easier said than done that all you have to do to progress with meditation is not engage your thoughts. Just let go of them! Once you have mastered this skill, it will indeed be easy, but it can take some effort, just like any other skill. Eventually, it will seem natural and effortless and you will wonder what the problem was.

  At first, pay attention to how your thoughts drift off. You have a random thought, which you use as the basis for making a conjecture. This is an active process. It may take a lot of time and practice to acquire a relatively undisturbed mind because random thoughts will simply keep popping up over and over. Yet, engaging them is something you actively do and which you should stop early on. You are not even sure whether A is going to happen, so why do you worry about B and C? This is also a great piece of advice for living your life as it will make you calmer and more relaxed in general. Meditation is a way of practicing this habit, and it will spill over into your daily life quickly. It should take you just about a month or so of constant meditative practice until you start noticing a difference. Even if you may not notice a difference, your close friends probably will. The other way people start to drift off is akin to daydreaming. You grasp a thought or a memory and elaborate on it. It is not as bad as making baseless conjectures about future events, but quite similar in nature nonetheless.