PDF Summary:The Master Guides: Choosing a Meditation Practice, by Shortform

Do you struggle with anxiety, stress, or other strong emotions? Are you struggling to find time to relax in the busy modern world? If so, you could benefit from meditation: a practice that many people find helpful for reducing stress, sharpening focus, and getting their thoughts in order. People from all walks of life, both religious and secular, have practiced and written about meditation for thousands of years, and it continues to be a popular relaxation method today.

In Shortform’s Master Guide to choosing a meditation practice, we’ve gathered the best time-tested advice on meditation from some of its most respected experts and teachers, from yogis and Buddhist monks to present-day self-help experts like Jen Sincero and Julia Cameron. To help you find the meditation practice that’s right for you, we’ll explore the meditation practices of four major traditions: Buddhism, Hinduism (yoga), Christianity (prayer), and modern Western thought. We’ll close by offering some tips for incorporating meditation into a busy modern lifestyle.

(continued)...

Second, yoga teaches you to listen and respond to your body, ultimately helping you to be more connected to and comfortable in it. You need to feel connected to your body to have a sense of self; if you can’t understand what your body is telling you (for example, are you hungry, or are you anxious?), then you can’t identify how you feel or what you need, and you won’t be able to properly take care of yourself. Feeling safe in your body also helps you articulate your emotions and even traumatic memories that were previously overwhelming.

Third, yoga teaches you to notice the emotions connected to certain physical sensations; this is especially critical for trauma sufferers, because certain physical sensations and poses can trigger flashbacks. (For example, many sexual assault survivors panic in poses that have them lying on their backs with their feet up in the air.) As long as you approach yoga at a slow pace and avoid becoming overwhelmed, the practice can help you work through those intense emotions.

Finally, yoga and body awareness improve your sense of time. Trauma causes people to feel stuck in their traumatic memory, and you may struggle to be present. Yoga encourages you to be present by focusing on your breath and body sensations, and it reinforces the fact that experiences are temporary. (For example, as hard as this pose may be, you only need to endure it for 10 breaths.)

Kriya Yoga

Kriya yoga is a particular style of yoga that heavily emphasizes pranayama: breathing exercises and controlling your inner life energy (called prana). This is the form of yoga that Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi) practiced.

While we’re all born knowing how to breathe correctly, that skill fades as we age. By adulthood, most people are only using one-third of their total lung capacity, and therefore taking three times as many breaths as they need to. Re-learning to breathe correctly strengthens your lungs and your immune system.

Yogananda explains that these breathing exercises remove toxins from the blood, which allows life energy to flow more freely. You might picture pranayama as removing trash (toxins) that’s blocking the flow of a river (blood and life energy).

Once your life energy is flowing freely, you focus it around your central nervous system (that is, your spine and brain), which strengthens your natural ability to perceive and understand God. This is called the Kriya Technique, from which kriya yoga takes its name.

A few of kriya yoga’s other techniques include:

Energization Exercises: A series of breathing exercises that takes about 15 minutes to perform. These exercises help you to consciously draw in spiritual energy from the world around you, using it to strengthen your body and release tension.

Hong-Sau Technique of Concentration: Withdrawing your attention from the world around you, focusing it entirely inward to help you solve a problem or meditate on God.

Aum Technique of Meditation: Developing your own divine qualities by meditating on God, and experiencing God as an omnipresent and universal force. In other words, understanding that God is present in all things, and that you are part of God.

Christian Meditation

In the previous section, we saw how meditation can be a form of prayer—a means of getting closer to God. Now, we’ll discuss how Christian prayer specifically can be a form of meditation, with all of the associated benefits.

Background: Christian Beliefs

Christianity is the belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God and God’s will given human form. In the Christian religion, the only way to be saved (to reach heaven) is to pray and follow God and Jesus’s teachings. Prayer is the act of communicating with God, either directly or through an intermediary such as Jesus or a saint.

Christian minister Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking) says that faith in God and prayer result in a greater sense of well-being, robust health and energy, and a stronger sense of purpose in the world. He also notes that the power of prayer can slow the aging process, helping you keep youthful energy as you age. Finally, prayer can help keep your spirits up, send you out each morning feeling refreshed and renewed, guide you in solving problems, and help you react properly to what’s happening around you.

Prayer

Christianity has many formalized prayers, but you can also speak to God in your own words—what matters most is that you keep your attention on God and have absolute faith that He will protect and guide you.

In Seeking Wisdom, teacher and self-help author Julia Cameron describes two different types of prayer that you could start with:

Prayers of Request

A request prayer is when you ask God for something, such as inspiration or a new friend. Request prayers are crucial because they’re how you receive God’s guidance—you make your request, then you listen for the response.

God’s responses can come in many forms, like a gut feeling, a new opportunity, or an abrupt change in your circumstances—you must listen to the signs and trust your intuition about what they mean. Sometimes God’s response won’t be what you wanted or expected, but above all else, you must trust Him.

Prayers of Appreciation

Prayers of appreciation involve expressing gratitude for the things you have, the guidance you’ve been given, and God’s gifts. These prayers are important because they bring you feelings of prosperity and abundance that will attract even more positivity and abundance back to you. Praying about the things you appreciate helps reinforce your belief in the innate goodness of God and the world.

To begin expressing your appreciation through prayer, you could observe the beauty of nature. When you observe things like green grass, intense snowstorms, and rumbling rivers, you often enter a state of awe, which is a great starting point for prayer. Use the energy of awe to express your gratitude for God’s beautiful gift of nature.

Once you’re in the practice of expressing your appreciation, try adding a few specific topics into your prayers: For example, you might thank God for other people, miraculous events, or experiences of serendipity.

Western Meditation

While often drawing from traditional meditation philosophies and techniques, some meditation practices don’t fit neatly under any specific religion or spiritual tradition. Since these practices largely come from the United States, we’ll call this category Western meditation.

Meditation for Creating the Life You Want

Many forms of Western meditation are based on the idea that there’s a universal source of infinite power and knowledge, and you can tap into it by harnessing your thoughts and willpower. This isn’t necessarily a religious belief; some people believe that this universal source is God, but others might call it “the universe,” “Source Power,” or simply “a higher power.”

Rhonda Byrne’s book The Secret popularized this belief. In it, Byrne teaches you to take advantage of the Law of Attraction: the idea that your thoughts will “attract” whatever you think about. In other words, you can create the life you want by simply believing that it will happen.

Think of yourself as a transmission tower, like the ones used to broadcast signals to your television. Those signals become pictures on the screen. If you don’t like the show you’re watching, you change the channel to a new frequency. A new picture is broadcast. Through a similar process, your thoughts create a frequency that signals the universe, and the Law of Attraction broadcasts that signal back to you as the pictures of your life.

In You Are a Badass, Jen Sincero argues that meditation is a way to connect to the universe (what she calls Source Energy), get into top mental and spiritual shape, and create the life you want. She argues that even beyond helping you to manifest your dream life, the practice has many benefits: Meditation will bring you into the present moment, open you up to receive unlimited information and ideas, relax you, relieve stress, strengthen your intuition and focus, let you hear your inner voice more clearly, fill you with light and love, put you in a good mood, and help you love yourself.

She notes that basic meditation is quite simple:

• Sit in a comfortable cross-legged position, with your hands on your knees or in your lap.
• Sit up straight; relax your face, jawline, and forehead.
• Close your eyes (or keep them open, gazing at a spot on the ground).
• Focus on your breathing.
• Release any thoughts that come into your brain, and focus back on breathing.
• Keep your mind as clear and empty as possible; listen for flashes of intuition.

Goal-Oriented Meditation

To harness the universal source, you must have a specific goal in mind—in other words, to get what you want, you first have to know what you want. Once you know your goal, achieving it is a matter of focusing your thoughts on what you want and truly believing that it will happen.

Sincero offers the following tips for keeping your thoughts focused:

• Set a timer to avoid distracting yourself by checking a clock.
• Light a candle and focus on it. A focal point can help you get centered.
• Imagine a beam of light coming from the sky and going through you from your head through your entire body, then back up to the sky again (in other words, traveling full circle). This can help you feel more energy and light and more deeply connect you to Source Energy.
• Use a mantra. This can help you chase out unwelcome thoughts.
• Meditate first thing in the morning before starting your day. The day’s activities can distract you.
• Set an intention. Meditating is about receiving information from The Universe, as opposed to prayer, which is sending information out to The Universe. You can start with your intention and see if any answers come to you while you meditate. Or, you can meditate first, opening up the channels and clearing out the chatter; then, ask your question and see if anything comes to you.
• Consider guided meditation. Many books and videos walk you through meditation. These can be helpful when you’re just starting out and having trouble chasing out unwelcome thoughts.
• Chanting is also a way to get into a meditative state. Chanting means repeating a mantra over and over out loud, by yourself or in a group class.
• Transcendental meditation instruction may also be helpful; this involves repeating mantras and sitting twice a day for a set period of time.

Meditation for Focus

In Hyperfocus, Chris Bailey discusses how to practice meditation and mindfulness to help you “hyperfocus.” Meditation and mindfulness improve your ability to hyperfocus because they increase your working memory capacity. Your working memory capacity dictates how much information you can pay attention to—the bigger it is, the more information you can process simultaneously. Furthermore, these practices improve the quality of your attention in general.

While many people use the terms meditation and mindfulness interchangeably, Bailey does not. He explains that when you meditate, you focus on a single thing and bring your attention back to it when your mind wanders. When you practice mindfulness, you pay attention to everything you experience in a given moment. For example, if you wash dishes mindfully, you pay attention to everything that happens moment-by-moment, like how the water feels on your skin or how it sounds as it hits the sink.

To meditate, sit down and focus on nothing but your breathing for a given amount of time each day. For best results, Bailey encourages you to start small: Meditate only for an amount of time that feels easy. He also encourages trying guided meditations with apps like Headspace.

To practice mindfulness, Bailey encourages you to pick a single daily task and be mindful during it. In other words, notice everything that happens as you do that task. For best results, choose a task that occupies very little working memory, like eating a meal.

Tips for Starting to Meditate

Here are some general tips to help you start meditating, regardless of which style (or styles) of meditation you practice.

Tip #1: Start Small

If you’re struggling to figure out how meditation can fit into your schedule, or if getting started seems daunting, begin with very short meditation sessions. For example, in You Are a Badass, self-help author Jen Sincero says that just five minutes a day is enough to get you started. You can then start making your meditations longer at whatever rate feels natural to you.

Tip #2: Build a Support Network

In Emotional Intelligence 2.0, the authors suggest seeking outside support when tackling difficult or daunting goals (like building a new meditation practice). They offer these two strategies:

1) Talk with a third party. When you’re in the midst of a challenging situation, it’s hard to see the bigger picture. Get an unbiased outside perspective to help you keep things objective and rational as you decipher your emotions and determine the best route forward. When possible, get advice from an expert—ask them about their methods, then try to implement some of their suggestions into your day-to-day life.

2) Publicize your goals. Working toward goals can be stressful. This stress often makes people abandon their objectives before they achieve them, especially when no one knows about them. When creating goals for yourself, share them and ask other people to hold you accountable. This gives you a support system to motivate you when faced with emotional obstacles that make you want to quit.

Tip #3: Try Active Meditation

Meditation doesn’t have to mean sitting quietly. If you’re feeling restless, you could try a walking meditation, as journalist Dan Harris describes in 10% Happier. Find a space where you can walk comfortably. Begin walking slowly back and forth along this path. While you walk, focus only on the process of walking. Think about each step you take: picking up your foot, moving your leg, and placing your foot back down. Harris notes that walking meditation isn’t the same as mindlessly pacing—you’re still focusing and constantly refocusing your attention when it wanders.

A variation on walking meditation is what self-help author Cal Newport (Deep Work) calls productive meditation—thinking about a problem while doing a low-intensity physical activity, such as walking or showering. This helps with problem-solving in two ways: First, the activity typically takes you away from distractions like your smartphone. Second, you train your ability to focus on the problem at hand, rather than daydreaming while doing a routine task.

Hatha yoga, which we discussed earlier in this Master Guide, is a more strenuous form of active meditation.

Shortform Resources

To learn more about Buddhism, see the following Shortform guides:

• Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
• Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach
• The Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama
• 10% Happier, Dan Harris

To learn more about Hinduism and yoga:

• Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda
• The Bhagavad Gita, Eknath Easwaran (translator)
• Inner Engineering, Sadhguru

To learn more about Christianity:

• The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale
• Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
• Seeking Wisdom, Julia Cameron
• The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

To learn more about Western meditation:

• You Are a Badass, Jen Sincero
• The Secret, Rhonda Byrne
• Hyperfocus, Chris Bailey