Your Meditation Quickstart Guide

Written by Kyle Schauenberg

Meditation is simple. It’s as simple as resting into the feeling of something you love.   There are certainly ways to be skillful with meditation, but the function of it is actually innate. You already know how to meditate. Your body loves and craves meditation. And there is a simple way to offer yourself this practice without much instruction.

In fact, even if you think that you have never meditated before, you absolutely have. Your body will grab opportunities to go into a meditative state whenever it can. This happens when you daydream or take a little rest or just allow yourself to be struck by beauty and linger there. Meditation is the way your body resets, processes life, and even fortifies itself against future stressors. In other words, meditation is the body’s innate regeneration function, and it wants to meditate in order to optimize its energy efficiency.

But people have a tendency to interrupt the meditation process, usually in favor of “being productive” or because they are discouraged when they begin thinking about stressful things. People don’t realize that stressful thoughts are a natural and important aspect of meditation. This is a key part of how the body repairs the wear-and-tear of a day. It’s the body’s way of evaluating and healing its stressors, and refining itself to be more resilient to them in the future.

And so it helps to know what to expect and how to engage with the experience of meditation, so that we don’t interrupt the flow of this naturally occurring, regenerative function of the nervous system. Creating an intentional meditation practice will help to develop meditation skills naturally, and harness the experience of meditation when it spontaneously occurs throughout your day.

Here is your “Quickstart Guide to Meditation”

1. Choose a comfortable and safe place to be (sit, walk, lie down, etc.)

2. Decide how long you would like to meditate and set a timer with a gentle alarm.

3. Take a moment to choose any aspect of life that makes you feel good.  It could be the thought of something that makes you feel alive or in a state of love, an element of life you adore or appreciate so much that you would merge with it if you could. This can be a memory, a fantasy, an idea, a feeling, a scenic place, a person, a hope, etc.  And the more delightful, the better.

4. Create a mantra – a word or short phrase that invokes this aspect of life that you have chosen for your meditation. This is both your entry point to meditation and the primary essence of the experience. Be with it gently, adoringly; cherishing your mantra and allowing yourself to feel cherished by it.

5. Thoughts will surface. They will come in the form of images, to-do lists, ideas, sensations, memories, etc. Welcome them. Inner and outer awareness/sounds/sensations will present themselves. Welcome them. Approach everything in your meditation with acceptance and allowance. Welcome whatever absorption arises; then allow yourself to be attracted back to what you love (i.e. your mantra) – tuning naturally back into the mantra. This is the rhythm of meditation.

6. When your timer signifies the end of this rhythm, allow yourself a few minutes (~3 or so) to transition out of the meditation and re-orient yourself into your space and your outer world.

7. If you have time, take a few more minutes to journal about your experience and make a date with yourself to do it again.