Thirty Minutes a Day

People want the abilities, the clear dreams, the sense of someone standing beside them in the quiet, and they want to know which book or course gets them there fastest. The answer disappoints a little. Sit down every day for half an hour and still your mind. Everything else in this Library grows out of that, and without it very little takes root.

What meditation actually is

Meditation is simply stilling your mind. Nothing more mysterious than that.

Most people already do it without realising. The seconds waiting for someone to answer the phone. Sitting at a red light with nowhere to be yet. The middle of doing the dishes, when your hands know the job and your head goes quiet. The shower. In each of those moments the mind stops chattering for a breath or two, and that is meditation, in miniature.

Start noticing those moments. Treasure them. Then, over time, stretch them. A few seconds becomes a minute, a minute becomes several, and one day you realise you have sat for twenty minutes without a thought you did not invite. That is the whole skill, and it is learnt by doing and by nothing else.

Why thirty minutes

Ten minutes is better than none. But ten minutes is mostly spent settling. The body fidgets, the day replays, the shopping list arrives. Somewhere around the fifteen minute mark the surface noise runs out and the real quiet begins, and you need time on the far side of that line for anything to happen. Thirty minutes is long enough to get somewhere and short enough to fit in a life.

Every day matters more than any single day. Five minutes seven times a week will do more for you than one heroic two hour sit on a Sunday. The mind learns the way a dog learns, by repetition at the same time in the same place, and it starts dropping into the quiet on its own once it knows what is coming.

The method I teach

There are many forms of meditation. This is the one I use and teach, because it is easy to master and because it builds control, which you will need for everything that comes later. If you have read Grounding, do that first, every time.

1. Find a place that is yours for half an hour. No kids, no animals, no phone within reach. The same place every day if you can manage it.
2. Sit comfortably, upright enough to stay awake, relaxed enough to forget the chair. Lying down is fine if sitting hurts, with one warning below.
3. Starting at your feet, tense each part of your body for a breath and then let it go. Feet, calves, knees, thighs, hips, tummy, chest, hands, forearms, upper arms, shoulders, neck, face, scalp. Breathe slowly in through the nose and out through the mouth while you do it. Two or three minutes.
4. Now simply be aware of your breathing. Let your diaphragm do the work. Breathe in and see the breath coming in as love and strength. Breathe out and see everything heavy in you leaving with it. Do not force the depth of the breath. Let it find its own pace.
5. Stay with the breath for as long as you can without another thought getting in. When one does, and it will, notice it, let it pass, and come back to the breath. That returning is the exercise. Every return is a repetition, like a lift at the gym.

Do this for thirty minutes, once a day, for a week before you add anything to it.

Soft sound in the background is fine. Rain on a tin roof, whale song, whatever settles you, as long as it becomes white noise. If you catch yourself following the music, turn it off.

What the first weeks feel like

Week one is mostly about discovering how loud your own head is. People sit down expecting peace and get a committee meeting. That is normal, and it is information. You are seeing for the first time what has been running in the background all along.

Somewhere in the first week or two you will probably fall asleep. Congratulations. You have reached some depth, and the body did what it does at depth when it has not learnt to stay. Keep going. With time you will be able to hold that depth and stay awake, and that is when the good stuff begins. That is the warning about lying down: it makes sleep easier and staying awake harder, so sit if you can.

By the third or fourth week most people notice two things. The thirty minutes starts to feel shorter, sometimes alarmingly so. And the quiet starts to follow them out of the chair. Someone cuts you off in traffic and you notice you did not react. A conversation that would have rattled you lands and passes. The practice did that while you were looking the other way.

A notebook by the bed

Alongside the sitting, keep a notebook by the bed and write two lines a day. What was in your head as you fell asleep. What was in your head when you woke. Over a few weeks that notebook shows you where your energy is actually going, which is often somewhere quite different from where you think it is. Most of us find worries, lists, things not done. Those things may matter. Seeing them written down is most of what it takes to stop them running the show.

Chop wood, carry water

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

It is an old Zen line and I come back to it constantly, because it says what the daily practice is for. The dishes still need doing. What changes is you, standing at the sink, and the change arrives through the ordinary half hour, repeated, until the quiet you built in the chair is the quiet you carry into the day.

After a lifetime of this I still practise the basics. They keep me grounded, and every ability I have was cemented there and would come loose without them. Go figure.

The mistakes people make

Waiting for the right time. The right time is whenever you sit down.

Chasing the experience. People read about the staircase on the Going Deeper page and want that on day two. Depth comes to a still mind. Build the stillness first.

Judging the session. A sit where your head never shut up is still a sit. You turned up, and the turning up is what the mind is learning.

Stopping because nothing happened. Something happened. You just will not see it for another fortnight.

Where this leads

Once the thirty minutes is a habit rather than a decision, the rest of this area opens up. Going Deeper shows you how to use the stillness. The Brain Wave States page explains why it feels the way it does. Visualisation and Binaural Beats give you tools, once there is a foundation to use them on.

Start today. Half an hour, the chair, the breath. You already know how to do this. I am only reminding you.

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.