Meditation

I had a saying for it at university, and I half believed it was a magic formula. It was not, but it was not superstition either, and the real explanation turns out to be more useful than the magic would have been.

It will not raise your IQ, and the studies that said otherwise have mostly not survived a second look. What meditation does change is your access to the intelligence you already have — which turns out to matter more.

Relax the body, ask what is happening, name what you find — then let it go. A mindfulness exercise small enough to do in a lift, and short enough that you will actually do it.

Longer sittings are not better sittings. Why fifteen consistent minutes beats an inspired hour, and what setting a timer is actually protecting you from.

You do not need a teacher, a cushion, or a belief system to begin — only somewhere to sit and something to count. A practical guide to Buddhist meditation, from choosing a posture to getting through your first fifteen minutes.

The full lotus is not a requirement, and forcing it will cost you your knees. A guide to every seated posture from chair to lotus, with four hip-opening stretches that make the hardest one possible.

The corpse contemplations are the classical antidote to lust, and they are not for everyone. Part two of the meditation objects series: what the ten impurities are, how they are practiced, and why.

The Buddha prescribed forty objects for samatha practice, because no two temperaments need the same one. Part one of the series: the ten kasinas, and how a disc of colored card becomes a doorway to jhana.

Meditation exists to end the cycle of birth, aging and death — not to make your week more manageable. Why the canonical answer is so much larger than the one most of us start with, and why the smaller one still counts.

A month at a Thai forest monastery taught me that most pain in meditation is not a problem to be solved but an object to be watched. What to check first, and where the second arrow comes from.