If you’ve tried meditating before, you probably struggled because of the vague information on it online. I hate a lot of the meditation resources online (just sit until you feel like you’re nothing? What??) and I don’t think apps like Calm or Headspace really do a good job of giving you the exact reasons why mediation is so beneficial and honestly kind of cool.

So let me give you my own, unscripted take.

Before I say anything, I want to define what meditation is.

Meditation is sitting down and closing your eyes for a set period of time.

Yes, that’s it. I don’t want you to think about mantras, about fighting fleeting thoughts, about “karmic energies” or any other stupid nonsense. Just sit down, close your eyes, and try not to move. The only way you can say you “failed” a meditation is if you open your eyes or scratch an itch. Don’t worry — failing will happen a lot, it’s part of the process.

We’re going to start by separating meditation into three broad stages. This is loosely based on the stages as they are described in Buddhism, but really they’re just fabrications I’ve created to make understanding this a lot easier. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Focus, Stage 1

The first step to meditation — and the first step to anything really — is to sit down and actually do it. People will think of any excuse under the sun as to why they shouldn’t sit down and close their eyes at the start of every morning. It doesn’t feel productive! I have a lot of things to do! My morning is a mess!

Well, quite conveniently, this is the first lesson meditation teaches us! Focus is the art of sitting down and committing to something, and the art of literally sitting down is the rawest form of it. It is a skill that is easily transferrable to many other tasks — commitment to exercise, commitment to studying, etc. etc. It is in this stage that we learn to catch ourselves getting distracted by various things and to just commit to whatever we’re doing for however long we’ve decided to commit to it.

This brings us to a classic beginner question: how long should you meditate for?

There’s a classic joke in the meditation world that goes something along the lines of “If you’re too busy to meditate for 15 minutes, try meditating for 30”. The point of this joke is that your concern about time or busyness is what’s stopping you from being able to focus — by trying to shorten the time you meditate for, you’re failing to learn the lesson of the first stage. It’s why some experts recommend you meditate for longer than you think necessary.

However, meditating can really feel like a long time. Try meditating for the 15 minutes, and you’ll find that it feels like an hour! Because of this, my personal recommendation is that the amount of time you meditate for DOES NOT MATTER — rather, just focus on setting a timer and not getting out of your meditation until you hear the timer go off. If you can get to the point where this becomes easy for you, regardless of what time you set it for, then its a good sign you’re ready for the next stage.

There’s one more problem you might come across, however. As it turns out, sitting on a cushion, closing your eyes, and not moving for for a few minutes — especially when its first thing in the morning — is a great way to cure insomnia. Yes, even if you stop yourself from scratching your leg, or keep your eyes solidly shut, you may still end up falling asleep.

There are two different ways you can handle this. The first is that you just embrace it. If your main goal is building focus into your life, it really doesn’t matter if you fall asleep at the end of the meditation. If you were to fall asleep studying, there’s nothing in the rulebook that says you failed to study — you only failed to study if you got distracted by something else in the meantime.

Indeed, sleep and meditation often pair well with each other, not the other way around. Some people do their meditation when they’re lying in bed, right before they go to sleep. Just stay prone, close your eyes, and don’t move until you finally drift off. That’s considered a success in stage 1! It’s also one of the principles of lucid dreaming, which is a sort of meditation offshoot.

However, if we want to move on to our other two stages, we might want to not fall asleep before we can achieve them. And so, you’ll want to try and fight the sleep demon.

The way you fight sleep during meditation is the same way you’d fight sleep anywhere else. Do it midday, drink a lot of coffee beforehand, etc. etc. As you get better in your focus you may even catch yourself drifting off and be able to stay awake that way. Regardless, we now move on to Stage 2.

Awareness, Stage 2

Stage 2 is where most inexperienced people tell you to start. It is the home of the classic stereotypes of meditation, such as blocking out all thoughts, observing your surroundings, being “a fresh leaf in the wind” (whatever the hell that means), etc. etc.

Despite these tropes, awareness is the most important thing you can possibly learn from meditation. I like to refer to meditative awareness as the art of “snapping the fuck out of it”. It gives you an emergency lever so that any time you begin to fall back to your more base instincts — getting nervous during an interview, drooling over the sweets at a pastry shop, dreading waking up early in the morning — you can pull the lever and take yourself back to what you really need to do. Compounded over years, this becomes a superpower.

And, as with most things in life, what is important is also very hard to achieve.

While you can conquer focus, you can never really conquer awareness. Your battling against millions of years of genetic programming — it’s hardly a fair fight. However, you can get good at awareness, and in most cases, all you need to do is press that level at least 75% of the time.

So, how do you learn awareness? Usually practice works as follows: you put your attention on nothing but the outside world. Noises from outside, wind on your body, numbness in your legs. It is at this stage that we’re really trying to not get distracted by thoughts. You will be distracted by many, many thoughts along the way, but think of it like this: every time you’ve ignored that thought and went back to the task at hand, you’ve successfully pulled the lever! These diversions are exactly the reps we need to strengthen our awareness muscles.

Virtually every person taps out at stage 2. And, as I’ve said, that’s okay because stage 2 is the most important. You aren’t trying to beat genes, just tame them. However, for those of you who are curious of what would happen if you do beat your genetics, you should read on….

Ascension, Stage 3

No one really knows if this stage actually exists. There’s been stories, sure — the most famous being the Buddha, whose achievement of ascension is what Buddhists refer to as the fabled Nirvana. But the veracity of these claims have always been questioned. After all… what is ascension, anyway?

If I’m going to be honest, this is where most of the fun of meditation lies. It’s where we can strip away the dull realities of having “better productivity” or “good mental health” and instead start to daydream about how things might be if we had an infinite wealth of omniscient knowledge and also the ability to levitate. Where we trade out our self-help and spirituality books for science fiction and pseudoscience. Still, we often learn most not from what is, but what could be.

In simple terms, ascension — or Nirvana, it’s pretty much the same thing — is when you’re able to pull the lever one hundred percent of the time. It is a state of being constantly locked in, 24/7. To be able to control every emotion, every mental function, every capacity of pain and endurance.

As I’ve mentioned, no one really knows what this would create. Some suggest it would be a super human, one who could “see through the matrix” and discover the hidden truths of the world us ignorant folk are unable to see. Of course, it’s all just speculation.

And while ascension might not be a practical goal, it can still be a goal to strive towards. This is the main tenant of Buddhism — while only the Buddha has achieved Nirvana, each monk is striving to reach Nirvana themselves. The virtue is not in achieving the goal, but rather in dedicating your life to trying to achieve such an insurmountable obstacle. Think the first Rocky movie.

There’s other religions with similar ideas. For example, Christians practice “Christ-like behavior” by following Jesus Christ’s example, particularly by practicing the seven virtues and avoiding the seven vices. I suppose one could argue that Jesus reached his own form of ascension, though his included the ability to walk on water and turn water into wine. Imagine what you could do!

But I hope this guide helped. In summary: start with focus, move to awareness, dream about ascension. ‘Til next time.

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