Everyone makes meditation so complicated, but it’s actually very simple. Here are 3 simple steps to start meditation.
It’s one of the most powerful habits you will ever install in your life, which will change everything you ever believed. Let me explain how this works.
I’ve talked and written about this a whole lot, and virtually everyone who’s somewhat spiritual, or not, tells you that meditating is very powerful. Almost divine. Society is coming back to this again. I mean, we did this as humans in the past, but we lost it.
Here is the Youtube Version of this whole post:
And it’s really not that crazy. Now, some people would call you esoteric, hippie, whatever if you meditate. Like,
what’s this crazy thing? It’s nothing really crazy. And it’s very simple to start with. I mean, I know you hear about people who meditate for hours on end, or even like Buddha did it. Meditating under a tree for months, and then being so enlightened, he actually understood everything. You don’t have to do that, you got to set your expectations lower.
So in this quickstart guide, we’re just going to talk about how to get started with meditating quickly. Because it’s very simple.
How to start with meditation quickly
There are apps you can use.
If you want to start with an app, I recommend Headspace.
It has these three-minute starter packs to just meditate for three minutes. And then you can iterate on that making it longer once you get better. And it’s guided meditation. So some dude is telling you what to do.
And it’s free in the beginning. Technically, you don’t need that kind of an app, you can just do it yourself. And it’s very simple.
Step 1: Starting Meditation, the setup
- Go into a quiet room.
- You sit down, upright. Not slouched in your chair. Shoulders back, straight back.
- You don’t need to do the Lotus position, but it helps.
- Close your eyes.
- Regulate your breathing using the 4×4 method
- Breathe in for 4 seconds. Hold for 4 seconds. Breathe out for 4 seconds. Hold for 4 seconds. Repeat.
- The idea is to first get out of your head. Focus on the breathing. Nothing else.
- Once you have this going, you then focus on the sounds around you, like the birds chirping, the noise from your computer or laptop, etc
- You listen to these things because this raises your awareness. Now you are actually aware of your surroundings because usually, our mind filters them out.
And once you’ve done this, you will notice already that your mind starts to wander at some point. It goes away, you might still focus on your breathing, or even just focusing on the sounds, but you might notice that some thoughts are popping in.
Now one thing is very important. You do not judge these thoughts. Not at all.
Just let them go.
Let them come and go. Might even be something sexual. If you’re still masturbating to porn, then usually there’s a lot of sexual images in your mind. Don’t judge them, don’t try to force them away. If you have a great thought, don’t try to hold it.
Because that ruins your meditation experience. If it’s a great thought, it will come back anyway.
There is a great metaphor used by the Headspace app that you sit on the side of a road. And on the road there are tons of cars and trucks. These vehicles are your thoughts. You just sit there chillin and you let them pass. Whatever direction they’re going or if they’re crashing, it doesn’t matter. You just sit there and let it go.
What does Meditation even do?
Now you would think why is that even a thing? What does this do? How does this help me in any case? The key thing is, most people these days are so focused with numbing their brain and not listening to their thoughts. If you think about it, you have notifications on your phone all the time. Even on your damn laptop. It pops up and distracts you. You have music in the background, you have your TV running, even if you just walk five minutes to the bakery, you put in your earphones, and listen to music.
For most people that is because they are afraid of their thoughts. Because they will tell them that something is wrong with their life.
Your soul has been trying to tell you for ages that you should change something.
But you don’t want to listen, you are afraid. And this is a key thing with meditation. Fear is not relevant, because these thoughts, they don’t become you. You don’t become these thoughts, you don’t even judge them, you just let them pass.
And if there is some thought that says, “Your life is complete shit, rather do something about it.” Boom, it’s gone again. Right? The key thing is that you need to find peace of mind. Because as long as there are so many things happening in your mind, it’s virtually exploding from all the stimulation you have every day, you cannot make a clear thought of what you actually should be doing with your life.
Imagine it like you have an email inbox in your mind.
And at that point, because you never actually open these thoughts, these emails, you now have 1,000 emails piling up in the backlog.
And meditation will help you to go through this slowly, step by step. So the email inbox is cleared at some point, and then you find peace of mind. And this is important because then you will actually find the connection to your higher self. In other words, you will find the connection to your subconscious. And in your subconscious, you have a connection to the collective unconscious. And there is everything you need.
Everything you need for what you want to achieve in your life, you already know.
And I mean that literally, your mind, your subconscious already knows what you would need to do to achieve everything you want. But you’re not listening. And you haven’t been listening for decades. Meditation is the key that gets you there. I’m not exaggerating this, it’s the most powerful thing you will ever start doing in your life.
Now, if you’re doing for three minutes, there won’t be much happening, especially in the beginning. The first week, maybe two weeks, for some even longer, you won’t notice anything. You probably just sit there in quiet and listen to these things and nothing happens. You might not even notice your thoughts, that’s fine, keep doing it. At some point, your mind will open. That is the key thing. Because then you will finally get the connection to your true self. To your higher self, to understand what you need to do in your life.
Step 2: Do not judge thoughts
One more key thing about the judging of your thoughts is once you realise that they just pass by, you realise that these thoughts are not you. This is a key thing to understand.
Just because a thought pops into your mind. It doesn’t have to be part of yourself. It doesn’t even have to be true or reality.
For example, if a thought pops in that says that you completely suck at whatever it is, and you have never done it before to see if that’s actually true.
That might just be you projecting it or your mind projecting it onto that thing, for whatever reason, because of past failures you had for example.
But the key thing is to understand you do not judge that thought. And that thought isn’t you. Just because that thought says that you are bad at it, it doesn’t have to be true. All the thoughts you have in your mind are just thoughts. And you can only know if they are real if you test them in reality.
If this thought, for example, says you are complete shit at, I don’t know writing Blog Posts like I had this thought in the past.
I just tried it.
And the key thing you will realise quickly with anything is that in the beginning, you might actually be bad. And you get only better by repeatedly doing it.
It’s quite funny because the second clip I ever uploaded on Youtube is still my most successful clip, currently having almost 50,000 views. My most successful clips so far about Troy.
So you would think how can it be that the second clip is already one of the best? And this is because I just did it. I just tried doing it regardless of the thoughts I had in my mind because the thoughts are not me.
It’s the same in your case. Some things might be true. Some things might not but you can only know if they are true if you actually test them in reality. So it’s key to understand that these thoughts come and go, but only the actions you take every day stay in your reality.
Step 3: Do not control your thoughts
The next key thing about meditating is you are not trying to control your mind. Because I know there are meditative apps that try to give you more control over your mental state. That’s not the point. There are some, for example, brain FM is a great app that will help you to get into a meditative state.
That is okay. But you’re not trying to control how your mind operates in the beginning. At first, you only try to free your mind.
You try to remove all this clutter, all this chatter in your mind, all these things that are going on, you’re just trying to free the mind.
So this is the attitude you go into your meditation now, when you sit down, you’re not trying to control or to direct your mind into any direction. You don’t want to get the million-dollar idea right now. It’s absolutely not the key. Even though I told you that you have all the answers in your mind already. Now you will be thinking, “Alright, I got to know how I get rich. I’m gonna ask my mind by meditating.”
No, you start with freeing your mind. And from that free mind, then you can access your higher self and your subconscious better. It’s a step-by-step process. You first got to free your mind. And that’s really all about meditating. At some point, you will find a few minutes are not enough because you actually enjoy the meditation. You will enjoy doing that. Then you will increase to five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And at some point, you will realise that you should at least meditate for 15 minutes because it takes about 10 ish minutes to get into the meditative state to truly have a connection.
But this comes way later. It’s just important to know in the beginning, do the three minutes, maybe even five minutes if you want to. As I said, the headspace app, you can choose for how long the guy talks to you and guides you through the meditation. And then you can advance this later in your life.
Do it every day. I’m sure you can make up three minutes every day in your everyday scenarios. Find a place to meditate should be doable for everyone. So do that and see your life thrive in the future.
