Most experienced teachers will tell you to find a teacher, and they are right. They are also, for most people starting out, describing something that is not immediately available. The useful thing to know is that the foundation of Buddhist meditation is safe to begin on your own, provided you begin gradually and build the habit correctly rather than ambitiously.
This guide covers what you need for a first month of practice:
- What meditation actually does
- Choosing a posture you can hold
- Samatha and vipassanā — the two halves of the practice
- Breath meditation, step by step
- What to do when you get distracted
- A checklist to run before you sit
What meditation actually does
The immediate effect, and the one most people come for, is that the body and the mind settle. That is real, and it arrives early. But it is the smaller half of what is on offer.
The larger half is that meditation shows you your own mind at a resolution you have probably never seen it at. Most people do not notice how reactive their thinking is, because they have never watched it from the outside. Sitting still and attending to one thing for fifteen minutes turns out to be a remarkably efficient way to discover how little of your attention you actually direct. That discovery is uncomfortable, and it is the entire point: you cannot govern something you cannot see.
You do not have to be a Buddhist to do this. Nothing in the instructions below requires belief in anything, and the benefits — steadier attention, lower reactivity, a measurable increase in ordinary contentment and in warmth toward other people — are available to anyone who sits down and does it. How much of that the research actually supports is a narrower and more interesting question than the usual claims suggest. For Buddhists the practice carries a further purpose: it is the instrument for seeing through the causes of suffering directly, rather than reasoning about them.
Choosing a posture you can hold
There is no correct posture, only the posture your body can hold without complaint for as long as you intend to sit. Flexibility, and the history of your knees and back, decide this for you far more than preference does.
If you are starting out, choose one of three: a chair, if your back or knees give you trouble; seiza, kneeling astride a cushion; or the Burmese position, with both shins on the floor, one in front of the other. All three are stable and none of them will hurt you. The full guide to meditation postures covers each one in detail, along with the stretches that open the hips if you want to work toward the lotus later.
Whatever you choose, the spine does the important work: upright but not rigid, shoulders loose, chin very slightly tucked.
Samatha and vipassanā
Samatha — settling
Samatha means calm, in the specific sense of a mind gathered into deep tranquility and deep concentration. The practice fixes attention on a single object and holds it there until the mind unifies into one point — a state called samādhi. Established firmly enough, that concentration opens into the absorptions, the jhānas.
Described that way it sounds remote. In practice, at the beginning, samatha means holding off the flow of thought for a few consecutive minutes, and even that is genuinely difficult. Start with patience and some sympathy for yourself. This is a skill, and nobody has it on the first day.
The object of meditation in this guide is ānāpānasati, mindfulness of breathing — attention resting on the sensation of the breath as it moves. It is the most widely practiced object in Buddhism, and the one the Buddha recommended most directly.
Vipassanā — seeing
Vipassanā means clear seeing: investigating experience until you see it as it actually is, rather than through the distortion that wanting and not-wanting impose on it. Concentration alone, however deep, does not do this. It was the Buddha’s distinction that liberation comes through vipassanā and not through absorption — someone who dies in a jhāna state is reborn in a heavenly plane, which is a fine outcome and not the point.
This element of investigation is what separates Buddhist meditation from practices that pursue concentration alone. Samādhi is common property; yoga and several Hindu systems develop it thoroughly. The investigation is the Buddhist part.
Schools order the two differently. The sequence below is the most widely accepted one: develop samatha first, then use the steadiness it produces as the ground for vipassanā. Calm is what makes clear seeing possible. Without it, investigation is just more thinking.
Breath meditation, step by step
Take your posture. Then find your contact point — the place where you feel the breath most clearly. For most people it is the rim of the nostrils or the skin just above the upper lip; for some it is the rise and fall of the diaphragm. Any of them is correct. What matters is that you pick one place and that the sensation there is distinct enough to come back to.
Now count. On the in-breath, watch the contact point and note “one.” On the out-breath, watch it and note “one.” Next in-breath, “two”; out-breath, “two” — and so on up to ten. Then turn around, count back down to one, and begin again.
Breathe naturally. Do not manage the breath to make it easier to count. As an optional way to start, take one deep breath in, hold it for a moment, and let it out long and slow — then leave the breath alone and let it find its own rhythm.
If you lose the count, go back to one. That is the whole remedy, and it is not a penalty.
What to do when you get distracted
You will get distracted. The technique is to note the distraction and return, rather than to fight it or follow it.
A door closes somewhere in the house: note “sound,” and come back to the breath. A thread about work starts up: note “thinking,” and come back. A knee aches: note “sensation,” and come back. If the right label does not arrive quickly, do not go hunting for it — “distraction” will do. The label is a handle, not a diagnosis.
Noting is doing more than housekeeping. Each time you name a thought as “thinking,” you are treating it as an event that arose and will pass rather than as yourself. Repeated a few thousand times, that distinction stops being an idea you agree with and becomes something you can watch happening — first with thoughts, then with emotions, moods and physical sensation.
The same applies to the body. If you notice your back has rounded, note it, straighten, and carry on. Losing the posture is not a failure of the sit. Noticing that you lost it is the sit.
The breath itself will change while you watch it — faster, slower, and sometimes it seems to stop altogether for a while. Noticing those changes is part of the practice, not an interruption to it. If the breath goes quiet enough that you cannot find it, rest your attention on the point where your thumb tips touch, note “contact,” and return to the breath when it comes back.
However many times you lose concentration, you return. A well-known teacher put it this way: if you landed your attention on the breath even once in the whole session, the session was worth sitting. There is no such thing as a bad meditation.
How long to sit
Start at fifteen to twenty minutes a day. Most teachers are reluctant to recommend less than fifteen, on the grounds that it is roughly the minimum needed for the mind to open toward deeper states at all before you stand up again.
Add five minutes at a time, monthly or weekly, based on how the practice is actually going rather than on ambition, up to around forty minutes. Consistency is what compounds here: a modest sit you do every day beats a long one you do occasionally, by a wide margin.
Before you sit: a checklist
Posture
- Back upright but relaxed; shoulders the same.
- Head tilted very slightly forward, chin in, comfortable and balanced.
- Hands supported just above the lap, one on the other (traditionally right over left), thumb tips lightly touching.
- Tongue resting against the roof of the mouth, or lightly on the teeth.
- Eyes closed or half open with the gaze unfocused, eyelids relaxed, lips barely meeting.
- Legs arranged according to the posture you have chosen.
The sit
- Contact point clearly identified before you start.
- Timer set for fifteen to twenty minutes, or whatever you have decided on.
- One deep breath in and out to begin (optional).
- Count: one in, one out, two in, two out, up to ten — then back down to one. Repeat.
- Lost the count? Start again at one.
- Distracted? Note it — “thinking,” “emotion,” “sensation,” “sound” — and return to the breath.
- At the end, dedicate the practice to the benefit of all beings: may they be free from suffering (optional).