How have you been meditating recently?
It is a question I ask people who practise the art of meditation. And the most common reply I receive is that despite putting in the time, they aren’t receiving their expected results. The issue is — not able to practice deep meditation.
Meditation is a great practice to decrease the chaos that seeps within. It helps you to be peaceful while you face the problems of life. However, many give up because they did not experience deep meditation. Meditation can provide its real benefits if one can meditate deeply.
This article will provide you with a complete guide on how to practice deep meditation.
The following things will help you to glide into deep meditation.
- Handling external conditions
- Ten-minute sequence to prepare you for deep meditation
- The secret to practising deep meditation: The 3rd Person Witness method
A. Handling external conditions to have a deep meditation
Create an atmosphere to meditate deeply
Eliminating distractions is the key. You HAVE to create an atmosphere that keeps you focused. For meditation, concentration is vital. So, you should remove all the things that can cause discomfort or distract you. Other than the mind, the troublemakers of distractions are our senses — eyes (look), ears (hear), nose (smell), touch (feel) and taste.
Lights
Do you think you see nothing when you close your eyes? It’s not true. When you are in a well-illuminated room, you can still see the light through your closed eyelids. So, you switch off the lights while going to sleep. Why not do the same when you meditate?
Meditation can work best in complete darkness. Try to make the place as dark as possible by closing the lights, blinds of your windows, door, etc.
Use a dim, blue-coloured light if you are uncomfortable with complete darkness. A study by the scientific journal PLOS ONE found that blue light accelerates the relaxation process (up to three times) after stress as against traditional white light.
Noise
Choose the quietest room in your home. If you are living with someone, you can request them not to make loud noises when you meditate.
If you are uncomfortable with the absence of noise, you can play the sounds of rainfall or ocean waves at a low volume. You can find these online easily. These sounds can also help mask the little noises that might enter your place of meditation.
Aroma
Remove any strong smell that might distract you during your meditation session.
If possible, use some mildly scented room freshener or candles to create a soothing aroma in the place of meditation. Not a necessary step, but it can enhance your experience.
Pick a permanent spot for deep meditation and do not disturb it
Fix a permanent spot for meditation. It could be a corner of your room or an entire room itself. And then use it just for meditation and nothing else.
Call that your meditation spot/room. As you meditate at the same spot, your mind will start associating the feelings of peacefulness with that area.
It is okay if you do not have access to your fixed place of meditation occasionally. You can meditate wherever you are. But fixing a permanent location can enhance your experience of deep meditation.
Fix a time for deep meditation
If you want to meditate deeply, you do not just meditate whenever you feel like it.
Pick a time of the day that is most suitable for you. When you start meditating at the same time, your body slowly gets habituated to meditation during that hour. It is like sleep. Once you start sleeping and waking up at fixed times, your body becomes accustomed to the sleep cycle and soon does not feel the need for an alarm clock.
Deep meditation is the easiest to achieve during the early morning hours. In yogic traditions, the time between 1 hour and 36 mins before sunrise and 48 minutes before sunrise is termed Brahmamuhurta and is considered the best time for meditation. After a night’s sleep, the mind is refreshed and calm. I recommend the interval between 4 am to 6 am for practising deep meditation.
If you aren’t a morning person, it is okay. Just pick a time of the day and stick to it.
Be regular
To reach the state of deep meditation, you have to be consistent. If you cannot commit more time, do it for 15 mins when you begin. But do it every day (or 4/5 times a week). Once you are comfortable, you can increase the duration. In the beginning, it takes significant time for the mind to rest when you meditate. It might never rest for a short span of 15 mins. However, consistency will help you to practice and slowly reach a state of deep meditation.
Wear loose and comfortable clothes for meditation
Loose and comfortable clothes avoid creating discomfort and thus distraction when you sit for meditation. Do not wear jeans if you want to practice deep meditation.
If you can, keep a separate set of clothes to be used just for meditation.
Prepare the seat for meditation
At the place of your meditation, use a soft cushion or blankets to create a comfortable seat to sit for meditation. Do this on the ground. Never meditate on your bed, sofa or any place you associate with sleep or leisure activities.
When you meditate with your legs folded, you notice a gap between your knees and the ground. Relax and support your knees by placing a blanket beneath them.
Avoid eating just before meditation
Digestion is a high-energy-consuming process and can create lethargy after a heavy meal or if you have eaten processed & fast food, meat, fish, etc. So, it’s not easy to meditate just after a meal. So when you schedule a meditation session, try keeping it at least a few hours after your meal or before your next meal.
B. Ten-minute sequence to prepare you for deep meditation
Follow this 10 min sequence to prepare yourself for deep meditation.
1. Stand and stretch exercise
Your body needs to be relaxed and prepared for you to sit still while meditating. A few stand and stretch exercises can help you reach that state.
2. Scribble all your random thoughts on paper
Just before you sit for meditation, scribble all your thoughts on paper for a minute. Do not censor them. They do not need to be coherent or related to each other. Write everything as you think.
This simple trick gives an outlet for the thoughts that race in our minds constantly and provides a window for a relatively calm and emptier mind to exist.
3. Recall your intention for meditation
If you haven’t created an intention for your meditation practice, I highly recommend you create one. It gives a sense of purpose, the ‘Why’ for your meditation practice.
The power of purpose can help drive you to a state of deep meditation.
The purpose of meditation could be — disconnecting from the chaos of the world; ability to better handle stress at work or in life; taking out some time just for yourself.
4. Do breathing exercise
Now that your body is relaxed, your mind emptier than before and a strong sense of purpose driving you, we will do deep breathing to transition into meditation.
Breathe in deep. Inhale deeply so that your stomach expands when you breathe in the air.
Breathe out long. Exhale so that your stomach compresses when you breathe out.
Do this five times before you revert to your natural breathing.
Now, meditate.
C. The secret to practising deep meditation: The 3rd Person Witness method
Even after you handle all of the external conditions and follow the ‘ten-minute sequence’, there remains the biggest obstacle you need to tackle while you meditate — Thoughts. The preparation can help you decrease the intensity of your thoughts, but to achieve deep meditation, we need a secret weapon.
Two common mistakes meditators make to handle their thoughts
If you think you can stop your thoughts while meditating and create a still mind, do not even try. Because if you do, you will create an exact opposite situation of what you desired.
When I tell you to not think about a cat, what is it that you start thinking about? A cat.
Similarly, when you fixate on stopping your thoughts, the mind will create an avalanche of them bombarding your mind. The harder you try to stop them, the more difficult it will become to control them.
Then what’s the alternative?
The opposite of forcing yourself to stop your thoughts is indulging in them. And this is the most common problem that meditators face. They get carried away by the thoughts that arise in their mind. It could be sheer randomness, imagining scenarios where you edit out past events to emerge as a hero, beating yourself up for past mistakes, reliving memories, future worries, and so much more. Getting caught up in the thought process will never result in a still and calm mind.
Then how do you practise deep meditation?
By using the middle path. The way of Yoga: 3rd Person Witness method.
3rd Person Witness Method
You neither indulge in the thoughts that arise in your mind nor do you desperately try to stop them.
The secret to deep meditation is to Witness them.
When you meditate, imagine yourself to be a 3rd person observing yourself. You are not the body or the thoughts. You are just a neutral observer, a witness of everything happening to the body and mind that used to be yours when you started your meditation session.
This method is a form of detachment. It helps you detach from your thoughts and all the emotions the body might feel while engaged in them.
As a neutral observer, you do not feed your thoughts. You only witness them and let them take their natural course as they arise. You do not go with the flow and feel the emotions that might occur by being in the thoughts.
As a witness, you do not force the thoughts to stop. You let them be. You see how they arise, take their natural course, and subside. There is no need to fight them because they do not belong to you.
You are not the thoughts. You are not the body.
You are the 3rd Person, the Witness of everything.
Breathe — The focusing technique
As you witness the thoughts, you slowly focus on breathing.
You observe how the body naturally inhales and then takes a gentle pause, a moment of complete silence, in the space between the breaths.
You observe how the body naturally exhales and again takes a gentle and natural pause. A moment of complete silence. The space between the breaths.
As and when the thoughts arise, you witness them and let them take their natural course. And then focus back on the breathing.
Inhale naturally. Feel how you are slowly entering a place of peace.
Exhale naturally. Feel how you ARE peace.
If you still think meditation might not be for you, I will suggest the alternative to meditation — The Wakeful Meditative State method. It can help you to be centred in peace while being productive. Click here to read it.
Let me know if you find this guide on deep meditation helpful in the comments below.