When training with the British School of Meditation, we will ask you to consistently think about how you can support beginners in their meditation practice.
When we first start to learn meditating, there can be a lot of misunderstandings about wat we are supposed to be doing, what the practice is supposed to feel like, or what our intention is for meditation. These misconceptions can often lead to people feeling that they are unable to meditate or finding it difficult to commit to a regular [practice.
One of the first and most common misconceptions of beginners, which we discuss on our training course is that meditation is about trying to stop thoughts – but this is not he case. When guiding beginners in meditation, it is vital to their practice that we help them to understand that the skills of mediation. That’s the art of the practice ais about simply observing thoughts rather than stopping them. I like to use what I call the ‘motorway analogy’ when explaining this.
Usually, in our everyday lives, when we are planning, remembering, analysing, processing, we have thousands of thoughts going through our mind and we often get stuck in these thoughts, one train of thought can spiral on to another, and another, and another… we can liken these thoughts to cars on a motorway, and when we are trying to pish these thoughts away, or ‘think’ our way out of them, we can liken this to us being on the road of that motorway, trying to dodge those cars, or trying to stop them… which isn’t possible. What we can do instead through meditation, is learn to simply observe them, the thoughts are still there, but we are not as affected by them… in this analogy, we can liken this to sitting on a beautiful grassy bank by the motorway where we simply watch the cars pass by- they no longer have an effect on us.
There are many other analogies like this which can be helpful to use with beginners to meditation, to help understand the skill we are developing in meditation.
When I was first starting out in my meditation practice, one thing which really affected my ability to stick with it was that I often got bored, I was chasing this wonderful, blissful experience, and I was often disheartened when that didn’t come. One of the best pieces of advice that I was offered along my journey was from a Buddhist Monk in a Forest monastery in Thailand, who quite simply told me not to have any expectations. Going into meditation with expectations of what the outcome ‘should’ be will only serve to hinder the practice itself. In order to fully soften into a meditation practice and ‘go deeper’ as need to let go of on desired outcome. In any case, every meditation practice is different, some days we may have a wonderful blissful experience, which is great. But others, the practice may simply be about observing a very busy mind and finding minute moments of quiet within it, and many other experience in between, each just as valuable as the other.
Whether you are new to meditating, or a teacher who is guiding those new to the practice, one other important thing to remember for those starting out on their journey to meditation, is that every person, every brain and every body is unique. There is no one size fits all model to meditation and one of the best things we can do is find practices which work for us. Focussing on the breath may not be comfortable for some people, they may prefer instead to visualise. However, we know that 1 in 50 people are unable to visualise in their minds and so for them, that may prefer a different practice. We may use mantra, sound or movement in our practice. Meditation can be accessible to all, but it is important to tailor our practice to what works for our own unique self - finding your own individual way to meditate an exploring the options is key!
Catherine Banks