What meditations should I start with?

What meditations should I start with? So I haven’t been meditating, but I am ready to start. I have just finished watched Rewired and I’m going to make a schedule that allows for daily meditations. I find that there is an overwhelming amount of meditations and I don’t know which ones to start with or how many to do a day. Any direction is welcomed. 

TJP

My advice would be to not worry about which meditation, how long, or when. It’s much more important to just start meditating. Then observe carefully what happens.

Increasing your ability to pay attention to your senses is the skill you are really trying to learn. Forget about goals or healing or manifesting a million dollars at first. Use your meditations to learn what being you really feel like in more detail.

Once you have refined your skills at observing your thoughts, your emotions, and your sensations in more detail than before, then it’s time to try focusing energy or emotions in new ways in order to change how your feel about specific parts of your life.

Most beginners are very impatient because we live in a world where the idea of instant gratification is being sold to us all the time. Beginners often think meditation happens to them, rather than it being a skill that you must study and practice.

Just like many skills, it seems like that practice phase goes on forever, then all of a sudden all the ideas and techniques come together and really powerful shifts occur in your consciousness or worldview. Just like learning other skills, sometimes you think you know the result you want.

But meditation often has the capability to surprise you, because you will be learning fundamentally different ways to experience life. You have to stay open to the unexpected and manage your expectations of not ‘wanting’ too much. Because you have never experienced the new ways of feeling or sensing that meditation can provide, you will have no reference points for the end result. Literally, your brain is not currently wired for those experiences.

Meditation will physically rewire your neurons to make new experiences possible. But that takes time. The brain is a physical organ. Rewiring it takes intense concentration and repetition.

To give you an example, I remember doing one meditation course where the exercise I was doing put me in a deeper state of calm than I could have ever even imagined was possible. I sat for three hours by a lake as the sunset, just watching the water, the sky, people around me, and the golden light. I had literally never had an experience of such deep calm and contentedness in my entire life.

I knew something deeply changed in me at that moment, because how I experienced the world had been so different. Those experiences are truly transformative, literally life-changing because they shift your idea of what is possible in your daily experience of life. But you never quite know when they will occur.

• Peter Hill

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