I want to share some of my thoughts and approaches to meditation.

Our minds are always active, handling a variety of inputs—ranging from thoughts and emotions to sensations and impulses—even outside our conscious awareness. Each individual experiences tons of thoughts daily, of which a large chunk are repetitive. While some of these inputs are welcome, many are not. Although we can’t stop this endless stream of information, we do have the power to choose how we respond to it.

So many different meditation methods exist, but the way I think about it is that meditation is the practice of processing the incoming stream of experience. You have the agency to either observe the experience, without going deep into it, or you can go down the rabbit hole of chasing a thought, completely forgetting what you were focusing on before. Most meditation methods can be described in a few steps:

• Sit still, observe something with passive attention, like your breath or other parts of your body
• Lose track and start thinking about something completely different
• Repeat

I believe it’s extremely valuable to try to spend time practicing how we interact with our mind, because it’s always with us, in whatever we’re doing, in every task, every day. Our mind is the driving force of everything we do.

Scientific research supports meditation’s benefits for stress reduction, improved focus, emotional well-being, sleep quality, and pain management, among others.

I have a kind of a love/hate relationship with meditation. Some days it’s interesting for me to do, but other days it’s the most boring thing I can think of. It’s literally just sitting and doing nothing so it’s the definition of boring actually. In any case I try to do it for 10 minutes a day.

There’s tons of good resources out there for learning how to meditate. I like to use guided meditation, especially the sessions found in Sam Harris’s Waking Up app - it has the most relatable approach for myself. There’s other good ones though, like Headspace. If you’re hardcore you can also just use a simple timer :)

Delight in just being, everyone.