New Year's Countdown…to a Fulfilling Meditation Practice

New Year’s Countdown…to a Fulfilling Meditation Practice

Developing a meditation Practice as a New Year’s resolution offers numerous health benefits. Meditation can reduce stress naturally by calming the nervous system and lowering blood pressure. It provides significant mental health advantages, including decreased anxiety and improved emotional well-being.

Key Health Benefits

Mental and Cognitive Advantages:
– Improves focus and attention span
– Enhances memory and mental clarity
– Helps manage depression and anxiety
– Increases self-awareness and emotional regulation

Physical Health Benefits:
– Lowers blood pressure
– Boosts immune system function
– Improves sleep quality
– Potentially slows brain aging

Personal Growth:
– Develops mental discipline
– Increases compassion and empathy
– Sparks creativity

Meditation is accessible, requiring only 10-15 minutes daily, making it an achievable and transformative New Year’s resolution that can significantly improve overall mental and physical health.

A view of the author’s home meditation altar

One, Two, Three – Meditate with Me

Developing a meditation Practice can be surprisingly simple and accessible, even for complete beginners. Meditation doesn’t require complicated techniques or special equipment – anyone can start. It can be as easy as One, Two, Three. Yes, a meditation Practice can be easily built with the help of a simple counting Practice.

Please allow me to help. I promise it will be both possible and powerful.

Here’s the simple plan:

Posture

Choose any meditation position that feels comfortable: seated, standing, or lying down. The only requirement is that you support your own body weight without leaning against anything. Deal? Good. Remember, we don’t need absolute coziness, and we don’t need absolute perfection. We simply want a balance of doable, repeatable, bearable, and comfortable. Our posture may change without our conscious efforts or with our intention…either is fine. Both during the course of a particular practice session and over the course of our practices, our posture is likely to change over time. Just keep balance and continue being responsible for your own posture. Let’s leave the rigidly unchanging postures to the statues, shall we?

Counting

Set a timer for 60 seconds. As long as we Practice this meditation method, the timer will be set to 60. Got it? Cool. We can certainly find 60 seconds a day, every day. In fact, right now would be a good time to pause your reading and set a daily reminder on our phones for this 60-second Practice. I’ll wait.

…

Ok, we’re back? Cool. Now, then:

This meditation is easy to remember and surprisingly simple. The idea is to remain in our confident posture, knowing that it will become comfortable for us in time. All we need to do is count to sixty in our mind as the timer counts to 60. The trick is that ALL we do is count to sixty in our minds as the timer ticks. Nothing else. See? Simple…but not so easy.

Of course, we’ll count the win if we count to 57 when the 60-second timer goes off. Close enough. The idea is to be fairly close and not exact. Needless precision so often trips up folks trying to develop a Practice.

It’s helpful to go into this Practice with the understanding and expectation that your sensations, thoughts, and feelings will indeed conspire to hijack your attention and intention. That’s OK. Every day we’ll give this a couple of tries. When we fail and sensations, thoughts, and feelings intrude, we simply suspend the Practice and try again next time.

This might sound too-good-to-be-true simple, but it’s a powerful way to train your mind’s concentration. The intention is to train your mind to concentrate on just one task – counting – without letting other thoughts derail you.

Counting to Less

In time, we’d expect to become more proficient and consistent. As this Practice develops, gradually challenge yourself by incrementally reducing the number counted to. Only if we feel confident, relatively comfortable, and certain of our consistency in our Practice (Let’s say, over a week or two of daily Practice.) will we consider deepening the Practice by changing the number we try to count to. We’ll keep the Practice duration at sixty seconds but change the count we work toward.

The first change, might be going from sixty to forty but over the same 60 second period. Remember, a self-supported posture that we are increasingly comfortable in, and only counting. That’s it. If we do anything apart from counting we simply suspend the Practice. We’ll try again the next time we’ve already set a reminder for. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps later today. A practice that fails to achieve a goal but is sincerely attempted is a success. You did it!

For this, we’re not counting breathing as something we are doing. Of course we are breathing. We simply won’t count breathing as a mental process; the mental effort will be to stay with purely counting. This makes it great for beginners because all too often a beginner to meditation gets tripped up when trying to follow a prescribed breathing system.

If we achieve confident competence for a consistent period, we can consider changing our count again. Breathe. Posture. 60-second clock and counting now to, perhaps, thirty. That’s it. Twice a day. If and when we don’t quite make it to thirty, we know we can try it again during our next scheduled Practice session. Not a problem. If, for a week or so, we find that the new number is out of reach, we know we should not push ourselves into the arena of strain, stress, or strife. We simply revert to our last consistent number. Now we know what’s appropriate for us. Maybe someday in the future, we can try to shift our usual number. But we will never need to. We simply may wish to try someday. What’s important now is that we have a healthful, attainable, and appropriate number to work with. Congratulations!

Eventually, we may work our way all the way to ten. Or so. Remember, no one going to nine is any better at this than someone who reaches their limit at 12. And the goal is not ten, the goal is simply to do this well, sincerely, and regularly. No one getting to ten wins anything.

I’m just giving examples here. The actual numbers are not so important. The numbers I’m suggesting are not magical. You’ll find your number. No worries. Yours may be 37 in 60. Perfect!

If you find yourself struggling to maintain the Practice for a couple of days, simply return to the previous count where you were successful.

Ongoing

Once we regularly get to about ten, there’s not much of a strong argument for pushing for a lower count.
Instead, we will focus on the mind, only counting as we’ve been doing. Additionally, we will include the idea that the body only maintains the chosen posture. We’d like to link the mind and the body as they experience stillness. One caution is not to seek stillness (in either body or mind) through stern tightening or rigidity. So, set the timer for 60, as we’ve done all along. Working toward your count, we will now aim to gently, mentally only count and physically only gently maintain our posture.

As before, when and if we find that we can’t stick to the count rate we have tried for, we simply suspend the Practice. We then return to counts that we’d earlier achieved and that we felt confident and comfortable with.

Eventually, we’ll find a count that is a nice balance of some challenge and surely possible.
And a count that we’ve found that we can regularly achieve. Whatever that number turns out to be, that number is perfect.The Plan

We’re looking for steady, patient progress, not perfection. Let incremental be the key word and let compassionate be they key attitude.

The plan will be to Practice this technique twice daily, maintaining a self-supported posture that keeps you alert and present. Aim to eventually bring both a soft mental focus and a comfortable, unstrained physical stillness to your count.

Congratulations! You've done it.

Remember, meditation is a skill that develops with gentle, consistent effort, and this method provides a straightforward path for beginners to build their mental focus, self confidence around the process, and inner calm. Each of these fruits of Practice become excellent resources…bottomless oases to nurture us through life and, if we wish, more challenging meditation Practices.

This methodical approach of counting can help build meditation skills gradually, making the Practice less intimidating for newcomers.