How You Can Meditate

The first time I sat down to do the basic meditation, I'd lost my mind. Is that uncommon?

It's completely common. When people first look into their minds, they say it's like a Russian waterfall or a torrent of thoughts or feelings of images-- lots of mental activity. So that's the first insight of inside meditation. It's seeing what the mind is actually doing.

The insight is our minds are out of control.

Exactly. So that's really an important insight because most people don't realize that. People are not even aware of what their minds are doing. So the seeing of that is actually the first big insight.

After now having spent a while traveling around the country proselytizing on behalf of meditation, there's one thing I hear all the time from people, which is OK. I get it. I know there's all the science that meditation is good for you, but you don't understand. My mind is too busy. I could never do this. Are there people who are just too type A to meditate?

No. As you say, all of our minds are all like that and start like that before engaging in some kind of training to slow things down a bit and to have a little more awareness of what it is that's happening. But this is common. This is the common situation for all of us. And the good news is that we actually can train our minds.

So here's a question everybody's going to have, which is how do I know if I'm doing this right?

It's pretty simple. If you're sitting, meditating, and feeling the breath, and you're connecting with the breath and then the mind wanders and you get lost and you see that and you come back and you simply begin again. No matter how many times you do that, you're doing it right.

But that's the meditation. That's the whole deal?

Exactly.

Nanoseconds at a time on the breath. You get lost. You start over. You get lost. You start over. You get lost. You start over.

Exactly. Of course, the instructions also will expand from the breath to many other objects of meditation, but the instruction remains the same. It's to be aware of what's arising, in this case, the breath. We get lost. Come back. Begin again. So that very same instruction and measure of whether we're doing it right continues throughout the whole practice.

And it is true that we have sort of a money back guarantee that you do this for a couple of weeks, you will reach full enlightenment.

Exactly. [LAUGHS]