The thing with meditation is that you don’t need to worry about crossed legs, lotus positions, incense, or special candles; they don’t make you any wiser. They don’t make you deeper in the meditation; just find a quiet place, and at the beginning, actually don’t try to expand your consciousness, and don’t do any grandiose mind work.
Try to learn how undisciplined your mind is and then how to control it.
Focusing on your breath
So what happens is you sit there and you have your eyes closed, and usually I suggest focusing on your breath because the breath is an incredible connection between the body and the physiology and the mind, as your mental states change, your breath changes.
For example, if you’re anxious, your breath is very shallow and faster; if you’re calm, your breath is very deep and diaphragmatic, so the breath connects the body, the mind, and the soul, so it’s a very useful tool. Focus on your breath and what you try to do for ten minutes; you don’t need half an hour or an hour to try to stop all your thoughts. To think of nothing but the flow of your breath, just focus and think of air going in and out for a whole ten minutes.
Control on your thoughts
What you’ll find is that you will not be able to; thoughts will start coming. What’s later for lunch? I have to send an e-mail; you know what I’m doing this evening and so on and so forth. Now the exercise is exactly there; what happens when the thoughts come? You shouldn’t fight the thoughts because you get into a fight with your mind. You cannot win it. You should also not chase the thoughts or attach any emotional feelings. I have to write the e-mail, and I will write that, and then, you know, I have to have lunch, and I will make this; that’s it. Your mind is running around, distracting you from focusing on quieting the mind.
What you have to do is let your thoughts pass and bring your mind back to the breath, and you stay with the breath, only think of the breath, and the next thought will come, and you just let it pass, and you bring your mind back to the breath.
At the beginning you might find that in ten minutes, one hundred thoughts come, but with practice the hundreds also become ninety, eighty, fifty, and twenty, until magically there will be one time you will have no thoughts, and what happens then is you will sit and think, Oh my God, I’m not thinking of anything, and that thought will come, so you will finish, and so you fail on that once, but the next time you will stay in it.