

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "10% Happier" by Dan Harris. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Are you looking for tips on how to start meditation for beginners? What are the three meditation basics?
Dan Harris is the former self-help and meditation skeptic who wrote the book 10% Happier. In his book, he explains how meditation changed his life and why everyone should do it.
Here are Dan Harris’s meditation tips for beginners.
Incorporating Meditation Into Your Own Life
Want to know how to start meditation? For beginners, meditation can appear intimidating. But, after seeing how meditation changed his own life, self-help author Dan Harris now firmly believes in the benefits of practicing mindfulness and making meditation accessible to people who don’t know how to get started. He thinks anyone can improve their well-being by using meditation, which is free and doesn’t require anything to get started. We’ll discuss a few of his recommendations on how to start meditating and how to apply meditation to your life outside of your dedicated practice time.
How to Start Meditating
So how do you meditate? Harris recommends these basics:
- Sit comfortably.
- Focus on your breath. Pay attention to the act and sensation of breathing.
- When your mind wanders (and it will), calmly refocus your attention on your breath.
Harris emphasizes that it’s important not to criticize yourself when your mind wanders. The goal isn’t to have a completely clear head. The goal is to be able to quickly and calmly identify thoughts and feelings as they pop up and then come back to your breath. When stronger urges like itches or pain come up, Harris advises to take a mental note of it and let it go.
(Shortform note: Experienced meditators also advise beginners against this kind of self-criticism, noting that your mind is supposed to wander—that’s what your mind does. If you try to tell yourself to clear your head, this often has the opposite effect. For example, if we say, “Don’t think of a purple hippopotamus,” you’re probably thinking of a purple hippopotamus—the same is true of telling yourself to clear your mind. This means there will inevitably be days when your mind wanders more than others. Even if you think a particular meditation session didn’t go well, meditators advise against labeling it as bad. Instead, consider every meditation session as a good one, simply because you took the time to be present.)
There are other types of meditation, too. During Goldstein’s 10-day mindfulness retreat, Harris learned how to practice walking meditation. Walking meditation looks like this:
- Find a space where you can walk comfortably.
- Begin walking slowly back and forth along this path.
- Focus on the process of walking. Think about each step: picking up your foot, moving your leg, placing your foot.
- Repeat.
Harris notes that walking meditation isn’t the same as mindlessly pacing. You’re still focusing and refocusing your attention when it wanders.
(Shortform note: In Deep Work, Cal Newport suggests that you try productive meditation as a method to think of new solutions. This is when you work through a problem while doing a low-intensity activity like walking. But productive meditation differs slightly from walking meditation. Instead of focusing on the process of walking, as you do in walking meditation, productive meditation asks you to return your focus to the problem whenever your mind wanders.)

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- A skeptic’s journey through the world of self-help
- How to control your anxiety, manage your ego, and become more compassionate
- How you can improve your life and career—even by just 10%
Mantra meditation is the practice of deep focused listening to a mantra in a meditative state to fulfill a certain intention. Mantra meditation is an excellent tool to raise one’s vibrations, overcome suffering and strengthen one’s powers of attraction.