Sometimes in meditation we come into contact with critical aspects of ourselves - facets of our mind which have strong opinions about what we should be doing, how well we're doing those things, and so on. Some of these 'voices', as we'll call them, can be highly critical. This is actually so common in modern society that there's a name for this phenomenon: the 'inner critic'.

When we encounter a harsh inner critic, the temptation is either to believe the negative messages it's telling us, or to turn away and refuse to listen to it at all. However, there's a third option, based in mindfulness: turning toward the voice non-judgementally, and actually seeing what it has to say - getting to know it better, if you like.

It often helps to give the voice a name. You might find it helpful to pick a light-hearted name, because it helps to take what the voice is saying less seriously - 'Oh look, Mr Grumpy is grumbling about something again.' For me, I've identified a few different voices within myself which want slightly different things, so I've given them names accordingly - for example, part of me really wants everything to be perfect all the time, as if I'm going to be 'inspected' at any moment. This reminds me a lot of being an army cadet on camp when you literally could be inspected at any moment, so I call that voice 'Drill Sergeant'.

Having identified and named the voice, the next stage is to get to know it. This might seem daunting, and it's definitely worth proceeding slowly and carefully. If it ever gets too difficult, come completely out of the practice and do something else for a while - go for a walk, watch a funny cat video on YouTube, whatever it takes to blow out the cobwebs.

But a key point to understand is that, once upon a time, these voices were probably just trying to help. Maybe something happened that upset you, and so part of you made a mental note and said 'Right, let's never do that again.' But then it happened again anyway, maybe a few times - and this part of you that was trying to protect you started shouting louder and louder, trying to make itself heard, trying to keep you safe. Unfortunately, over time this became more and more severe, and has now become completely twisted, so we end up with these internal voices criticising our every move and constantly yelling at us, and it can be very difficult to detect any hint of kindness or good intention in what's being said.

So the idea with identifying, naming and then getting to know these critical inner voices is so that they can actually be heard. The inner critic is often so harsh because it's been ignored or avoided for so long. Turning toward it, really listening not just to what it's saying but actually asking it why it's saying those things, can begin to transform your relationship to it. Over time we can actually befriend these parts of ourselves, and the harsh, stinging nature of the criticism will gradually lessen.

It's really important to say that I'm not a trained therapist/counsellor or a medical professional, and severe situations might well need the support of a trained professional. On the other hand, these techniques have been used by many meditators successfully for a long time, so it's certainly worth giving them a shot to see what happens - you might just discover a kinder relationship to yourself, and find some relief from that inner critic. Just remember, as ever, to proceed slowly and gently, and stop at once if it gets too overwhelming.

Three levels of practice, three levels of awakening

Meditation practice can work on three levels - mind, heart and body. Different people will be drawn to different approaches; you’ll find that you get on much better with some techniques than others. In addition, sometimes working on one level can help to get past an inner block or difficulty that practices on another level haven’t been able to resolve - for example, a deep-seated anxiety that no amount of mental training has been able to shift might be resolved by doing some work with the body.

So let’s take a look at the three levels of practice and see what each might offer us!

The mind

The mind is an incredibly powerful resource if we can learn to harness it. It can also be a huge source of problems!

We can use meditation to train the mind in a couple of helpful ways:

- Focus. Many meditation practices use an object (sometimes called an ‘anchor’) to train the mind to focus. For example, we might pay attention to the breath, to a candle flame, or to a visualisation. Each time we notice that the mind has wandered away, we bring the attention gently back to the anchor. Over time, our attention becomes clearer, sharper and less unruly, and our minds become calmer and quieter.

- Insight. By looking closely at our moment-to-moment experience, we begin to see how the mind actually works - the endless loops of habitual thinking, the deep-seated patterns of behaviour which drive more of our actions than we might like. Over time we see deeper and deeper into the mind, and ultimately we come to discover who we really are, beyond all the ideas and stories we carry around. We come to see ourselves not as a solid, separate thing in a world of things, but as a fluid process in a world of processes. This shift of perspective, called kensho in Zen, brings great freedom and joy into our lives.

We awaken at the level of the mind when we bring stillness and clarity to our minds and see what’s really going on - we find new ways of relating to our experience which bring profound freedom from stress, anxiety and suffering.

The heart

Life is ultimately all about relationships; we exist in relation to our friends, families, co-workers and neighbours, and the quality of our lives can be measured in the quality of those relationships.

With this in mind, we can use meditation to open our hearts and connect with beautiful qualities of warmth and peace that are innate to our being but all too often buried under a lifetime of conditioning and pain.

Within ourselves, we find an inner reservoir of kindness and love, which is simply the natural expression of an open heart. When that open-hearted quality encounters suffering, it takes on the form of compassion - the earnest wish that the suffering be relieved. When an open heart encounters joy, it resonates in delight, whether that joy is found in ourselves or in another. And as we learn to settle into the experience of an open heart, we find the unshakeable peace of equanimity, a kind of inner stability from which we can view the comings and goings of the world without getting sucked into its drama against our will.

Through heart practices, we learn to extend these qualities toward the people around us, and also to ourselves - either or both of these can sadly be difficult at first, but with time and gentle practice the heart will respond. Initially it may be easier to feel or express these qualities toward some people (such as close friends) and harder towards others (the more difficult people in our lives, perhaps), but as the heart practices develop we find that a shift takes place - a breaking down of barriers, where we move beyond the mind’s categorisations of self and other, good and bad, friend and foe - and these beautiful qualities of the heart radiate out in all directions, equally and impartially. This radiant heart will inevitably enrich our lives and our relationships, as its warmth touches every person we encounter.

The body

The third dimension of meditation practice is the physical body. Perhaps you’re already a physical person - an athlete, a dancer, an artisan - or perhaps you work at a computer all day long, but either way your body is the instrument through which you experience the world and express your innermost thoughts, intentions and desires.

The body, heart and mind are intimately connected. If we experience a lot of anxiety, that will tend to show up in the body as patterns of tension, stiffness and discomfort. And as we work with the body, we can often find strong memories or emotions bubbling up to the surface. Gently opening and aligning the body will often cause the release of mental or emotional blockages which are difficult to approach on the level of the mind or the heart.

Beyond the purely physical, we can also work with the body’s energetic system. There are many different traditions and practices for working with energy, such as kundalini yoga, qigong, or the energetic practices found in Rinzai Zen. These practices give us a way to connect with our bodies at the subtlest levels, to explore what’s going on inside us and work with areas of tension and blockage.

Body-based approaches also provide us with a bridge between meditation practices for the mind and heart, which are often carried out in stillness, and the rest of our lives, which are often filled with movement and activity. Bringing mindful attention and an open heart to a physical practice such as yoga, tai chi or running is a very powerful way of integrating all aspects of our spiritual lives, and allowing the benefits that we experience in formal meditation to infuse our daily lives and activities.

Bringing it together

Ultimately we must explore and integrate all three levels - mind, heart, and body. All three are connected: you might well find that experiencing kensho allows your heart to open naturally; that working with self-compassion helps to soften and relax tension in the body; or that aligning and opening the body naturally brings your mind to rest and allows you to see much more clearly than before. Or you might find that these are three separate paths of exploration, each of which will bring different discoveries and rewards - each bringing openings on different levels. Either way, however, awakening is most powerful when it unites wisdom and compassion in a fully embodied way.

So don’t be a one-dimensional practitioner! What might you be leaving out? What approaches could you explore to find new openings in your practice?

A common theme in Buddhist practice, including Zen, is what the earliest texts call 'dukkha'. The most common translation of this Pali term is 'suffering', but sometimes that word doesn't work so well for people - it can come across as pretty drab and heavyweight, like you need to be living in a Greek tragedy in order to qualify. A more modern term that's become quite popular is 'stress', but that comes with some other connotations and can make the whole thing sound a bit like a psychological therapy, which isn't quite what we're getting at in Zen. Personally, I quite like another term that I first encountered in the Chan (Chinese Zen) tradition - 'vexations'. From time to time, we all get vexed. We can all think of that one person who's... well, vexing.

People come to Zen practice for a variety of reasons. One common motivation is an excess of vexation: they find, for whatever reason, that life just isn't really working for them, and they want a way out, something to alleviate the suffering. This is the Buddha's own story: he looked at what life had in store for him - old age, sickness and death - and decided he didn't fancy it much, so set off to explore the spiritual path and see what could be done about it.

Not everyone comes to practice through being excessively vexed, of course. For some people it's more about curiosity, a sense of exploration, of wanting to know what's going on - this meditation thing seems to do something, but what? What do these cryptic texts actually mean? (That's been my primary motivation for practice.) And, of course, there are many other reasons too.

Whatever the motivation to practice, however, sooner or later we run into vexation and have to learn to deal with it. The mind spends a lot of time bouncing from one vexation to another, driven by preferences - a process of categorising our experience into things that we like (and hence want more of) and things we don't like (and hence want to get away from). This process is so deeply ingrained that it actually colours our very perception of the world, making the good things appear more attractive than they are, and the bad things more repulsive. So we're being constantly pushed and pulled around by these preferences, with the mind rarely given a moment's rest.

Allowing the mind to come to rest is an interesting experience. When the mind becomes still enough, we can temporarily drop the preferences colouring our perception. When that happens, we see 'things as they are', to use the traditional phrase - this moment appears to us without any sense of lack or insufficiency, any sense that it needs to be in any way different. This sense that things are fine just as they are, of wishlessness, develops into a feeling of profound contentment, a deep source of inner well-being which is not at all dependent on anything outside of ourselves. Sometimes in the Zen literature you'll see descriptions of reality appearing as spontaneously 'perfected' - perfect not in the sense that it glows and shoots rainbows, but in the sense that we truly experience the world as not needing to be different in any way, but rather to be completely and wholly fine just as it is - in other words, perfect.

So this gives a sense of one way the path of Zen can unfold. We begin by understanding what gives rise to vexations; only then can we begin to learn how to be free of those vexations. And then as the mind progressively lets go of vexation and settles into stillness, an experience of life that is rich and full, yet fundamentally peaceful and contented, becomes increasingly available to us.

If this sounds interesting, I'd like to suggest a practice that you can use to explore these themes - Zen is first and foremost about direct experience, not about ideas and philosophical arguments. So let's take a look at one way we can explore the mind's tendency to become agitated and see if we can find ways to relax and let go into peace and stillness.

One of the first meditation techniques I ever learnt is called Silent Illumination in the Chan tradition, more commonly known from Japanese Zen as 'just sitting' or shikantaza. In the Chan style, the practice begins by slowly sweeping your attention down the body, from the top of the head to the soles of the feet, relaxing any tension in each part of the body as the attention moves through that region. This helps the body to become still, which in turn helps the mind to become still. The whole process should take at least a few minutes, depending on how long you have to practise. When you've finished releasing tension, you then bring the attention to the body as a whole. The body is still, in a sitting posture; the mind is clearly aware that the body is sitting. And that's it. The 'silence' of Silent Illumination is the stillness of body and mind - whatever comes up (thoughts, sounds, bodily sensations, emotions), we don't get involved with it; we're simply aware of the body, sitting. But it isn't a dull or stagnant silence, a zoning out or switching off. Rather, the awareness is clear and bright - we know very precisely that the body is sitting, and that's the illumination aspect, the clarity which balances the stillness.

That's the basic practice. It may be that as the practice develops (or if you've done this kind of thing a lot already, it might happen almost immediately), it starts to feel a bit narrow and confining keeping the attention on the physical body. If so, it's okay to allow the awareness to expand to take in the whole environment; you can think of the whole environment as 'the body, sitting' and simply rest with that. (At this point the practice is essentially the same as the open awareness practice on the Audio page of this website.) But there's no need to rush to get to 'stage 2' of the practice - whether the focus is on the physical body or open to the whole environment, the skills of silence and illumination being trained are exactly the same. Neither approach is better or worse, they're just different expressions of the same fundamental experience.

Silent Illumination is a very 'complete' practice, in the sense that it develops concentration, insight and equanimity in equal measure, and once you have a taste for the attitude of allowing the mind to be still even in the midst of distraction and activity, you can bring that more and more into daily life, where it really delivers its greatest value. If you're temperamentally suited to this kind of practice it's a great way to go. It doesn't suit everyone, however; some people find that they prefer more 'active' practices such as self-inquiry, for example. As with anything in meditation, it's vital that you explore new practices with an open mind and be as honest with yourself as you possibly can. So give it a try and see how you get on!

A question that often comes up when teaching mindfulness to beginners is 'Do I really need to meditate, or can I just be mindful all the time instead?'

Before answering this, it's worth saying that some teachers use these terms interchangeably, so to be clear I'll say how I'm using them. When I refer to 'meditation' I mean a formal practice in which we set aside a period of time to sit, stand, lie down or walk in a specific way, engaging with a particular meditation technique such as following the breath or paying attention to bodily sensations. I'm using 'mindfulness' to mean 'the awareness which arises when paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally', which is how mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn defines it in his book Full Catastrophe Living.

One of the motivations for practising meditation is to develop the skill of mindfulness, which we can then begin to integrate into our daily lives. So the question is essentially asking if we can skip the first step and go straight to being mindful in daily life, without the need to meditate at all. Sometimes the question is phrased a bit differently, like 'Can I meditate during my walk to work?', and sometimes it's phrased more as a statement, like 'I don't need to meditate because I walk my dogs mindfully.'

So, how about it? Do you actually need to meditate or is off-cushion mindfulness enough by itself?

Personally, I'm a big fan of starting with meditation and then gradually bringing mindfulness into daily life. That's how I teach, and that's the approach that seems to work best for most people - even the ones who are convinced they 'can't meditate'!

Practising mindfulness in daily life is extremely valuable, and at some point becomes vital if you want to bring the skills you're developing on the cushion into the hurly-burly of daily life, which is where they'll be the most useful. However, in the modern world with its oh-so-many distractions, so much to do and so many things on our minds, paying attention to the present moment without wandering off in thought doesn't come naturally to most people, and it's typically much more difficult to remain mindful while moving through your daily activities because there's usually so much to think about, or at least that's how it seems.

So, even if you find meditation difficult initially, you'll probably find it much easier to use meditation to develop a solid foundation in mindfulness, in the same way that it's easier to learn a language if you start with some simple phrases and exercises rather than jumping straight into fluent conversation with a native speaker.

Indeed, many people find that after they've been meditating for a few weeks, they seem to find it harder to stay in the present moment without wandering off into distraction. Believe it or not, this is actually a good sign! A big part of the process of meditation is becoming more aware of what's going on in our minds, and the often surprising discovery of how unaware we were beforehand. After some practice we start to notice just how often the mind does wander. Again, this is much harder to see if you jump straight into mindfulness in daily life without ever sitting quietly in meditation. Unfortunately, this can sometimes lead people to believe that they're mindfulness experts simply because they're largely unaware of how often they're distracted!

In the interests of balance, it's worth saying that some people do develop great mindfulness without ever meditating. Elite athletes, skilled artisans and so on often describe their state of mind when engaged in their particular activity of expertise in a way that sounds remarkably like a high level of mindfulness. And if that approach really does work for you, that's great, and please don't let me stop you. But do consider whether this really is true, or whether it's just possible that your mindfulness would benefit from a formal meditation practice as well.

The progression that I recommend is for people to start off with a mindfulness-based meditation practice that they find appealing - some people like the body scan, some people like breath counting or following, some people like open awareness (guided meditations for all of these are available on the Audio page) - and spend a couple of weeks practising that to start to get a feel for what it means to be mindful.

Once you've built up some foundation in mindfulness through meditation, you can start to introduce it into daily life. It's usually best to start with one or two specific activities in your daily routine - for example, brushing your teeth, or washing the dishes (or loading the dishwasher!) - and try to do just those activities as mindfully as possible each day, until it becomes a habit, then add some more activities, and so on. Trying to go straight to 'being mindful' all day long is usually a recipe for frustration. Start small, build up, and keep going - over time you'll find mindfulness coming more often and more naturally, and the benefits becoming increasingly integrated into your daily life.

Good luck!

Over the last few entries in this blog, we've talked about a range of different meditation techniques. We've looked at mindfulness of breath and body, the cultivation of loving kindness and compassion, self-inquiry as a route to meditative insight, the development of mental stability and stillness, and open awareness as a way of 'being, not doing'.

When there are so many possibilities for practice, how do we decide what to do with our practice time? For some people it can be daunting even to get started - what happens if we pick the wrong technique? Should we practise just one technique, or several? And how long for - how much is 'enough'?

As I've said before, meditation is one of the most personal and individual activities you will ever undertake. As a teacher I can offer suggestions for how to practise, but ultimately the real power in this process comes when you start to figure out for yourself what works for you and what doesn't. There are really very few hard-and-fast rules about how to do this stuff - 'some' is better than 'none', and that's about it!

That being said, I'll give some suggestions here for how you might start to explore meditation practice. If you've never meditated before, I'd suggest it's worth trying a range of different techniques, to see what works for you and what doesn't feel like such a good fit right now. On my beginners' course we spend a week on each of six practices - mindfulness of the breath, the body scan, metta and compassion, self-inquiry, concentration and open awareness. (The links here take you to blog posts talking about each practice and providing some wider context.)

I'd suggest spending at least a week on each practice, rather than dropping them after a day or two. All meditation techniques take a while to get used to, and it might be that it takes you a few tries to get into the groove of a particular practice.

You can also use these first few weeks to explore how meditation fits into your life. Are you a morning person or an evening person? Are you better off finding ten or fifteen minutes in the middle of the day, perhaps during a lunch break if you're an office worker? Most people find it helpful to have a specific time each day when they practise, so it becomes part of your daily routine, like brushing your teeth.

How long should you practise? Well, how long do you have? Five minutes is infinitely better than nothing! Even short sessions like this produce noticeable benefits given time. Ten minutes is at least twice as good as five minutes, of course. If you have longer, could you try sitting for twenty minutes, or half an hour? However, it's probably worth starting small and building up, rather than trying to jump straight into two-hour daily sits and giving up immediately. Trying to force yourself to sit for twenty minutes every day when you can really only honestly fit in ten minutes is usually counterproductive - at some point you'll start skipping days, and soon you won't be practising at all. The key thing is to do some practice, no matter how much, and keep doing it. That's all. If you can do that, you're on the right road!

So once you've figured out how to fit meditation into your day, and you've got a sense for which techniques work, how should you use the time you have?

Again, there's no one 'right answer', just some loose guidelines based on what I and others have found to be helpful. Any of the practices I've listed above have the potential to transform your life over time, so feel free to go with whatever speaks to you (although see the caveat below about concentration meditation).

I'll suggest three common ways to structure your practice which you might find helpful.

1. Pick one technique that you like and do that every day.

This is a great way to go - as the saying goes, it's better to dig one deep hole than lots of shallow ones. The only caveat here is that concentration practice shouldn't be the only meditation you ever do, since this can sometimes lead to a kind of avoidance strategy where we use our powers of concentration to turn away from our problems rather than dealing with them, and this can result in people disconnecting from their lives in a way that isn't helpful.
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2. Pick a few techniques and cycle through them.

Perhaps you could do mindfulness of the breath on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and metta on Tuesdays, Thursdays and the weekend. Or maybe spend a week on one, then a week on another, and so on.

This can be a nice way to keep your practice fresh and interesting if you find that focusing on one technique gets boring quickly. Be careful that you don't jump around too much, however. Some of the modern meditation apps offer a constant stream of new guided practices, which can seem great at first, but actually tends to turn meditation into a kind of entertainment where there's always a new 'episode' to consume. The real power of meditation comes from consistently applying a technique to build skills and capacities within yourself, rather than simply entertaining yourself for ten minutes each day. (That's not to say that entertainment is a bad thing! But we're trying to do something different here.)

3. Use a specific sequence of techniques each time you sit.

For a long time, my own daily practice started with a few minutes of metta to open the heart, went into concentration practice for roughly half the remaining time to settle the mind, and then on to an insight practice for the final portion. Clearly it's helpful to have slightly longer sits if you want to use several techniques in a session - I was sitting around forty minutes each day at the time - and it's also important to be clear about what techniques you're going to use, for how long and in what order. Avoid the temptation to jump around from technique to technique whenever you get bored - that's just a more sophisticated form of distraction, the mind's way of wriggling out of having to settle down and meditate properly. But if you find several techniques appealing and would like to practise them every day, structuring your sits in this way can be a great way to do that.

All that being said, there are really no rules! Experiment, play, try things out and see what works for you. Sooner or later you'll find something that clicks, at least for the time being; take it, run with it and see where the path leads. You won't know until you try...

Some of us suffer from 'hurry sickness' - forever rushing from one task to the next, always thinking about everything that still needs to get done somehow, never giving our full attention to what we're doing right now. For others among us, time weighs heavily. The minutes and hours crawl by slowly, dragging on forever. In both cases, we experience 'time stress' as a result.

So is there anything we can do about it? (It might not surprise you to learn that I'm going to say 'yes', and that meditation can help...)

Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined the term 'Flow' to describe a powerful experience that he'd observed across many different people in many different situations. The 'Flow' state comes about when someone is engaged in a challenging activity which provides immediate feedback and is toward the upper limit of the skill of the practitioner, but not out of reach. (Think of a skilled acrobat performing a dangerous and challenging routine, or a concert pianist performing a very difficult piece.)

Some of the characteristics of the Flow state:

• A distorted sense of time, or no sense of time at all
• Little or no sense of self (the performer and the activity merge into one)
• Intense, focused concentration on the present moment
• A sense of control over the outcome
• A sense that the activity is intrinsically rewarding - in other words, it's enjoyable, and it's worth doing simply for the sake of doing it, not for any other reason

Interestingly, there's quite a bit of overlap between Flow and meditation. Csikszentmihályi even said that meditation is like a carefully planned Flow activity. It's also true that regular meditators seem to be more likely to experience Flow states and stay in them for longer, perhaps because the skills trained in meditation are so similar to the conditions of Flow.

One interesting point here is that this suggests a way to escape from time pressure. Flow activities are in part absorbing and enjoyable because they distort our sense of time - in Flow there's no room for worrying about the future or obsessing over the past, because we're purely focused on the present moment. Likewise, meditation trains us to come back to the present moment again and again, allowing us to step out of time pressure and into the 'timeless now'.

For people prone to 'hurry sickness', meditation can sometimes feel like just another thing that needs to be done. And some meditation techniques can even reinforce this - some techniques involve quite a bit of setup, a lot of 'doing' during the meditation period, and so on. But if we're looking to tap into a sense of timelessness, we need to emphasise being rather than doing, and it can be helpful to employ a meditation technique which really focuses on 'just being'.

In the Zen tradition, one very popular way of practising is an open awareness approach variously called 'just sitting', shikantaza or silent illumination. The practice is very simple, but can seem initially bewildering to people used to more structured practices. In the open awareness practice we don't use any particular 'anchor' or object of focus. We simply sit, and allow our experience to show itself to us. In a sense, there's nothing at all to 'do' here, but that can be a bit misleading because we very quickly find that the mind likes to wander and get tangled up in thoughts, sights or sounds. A better way to think of the practice might be as 'resting in awareness' - allowing our awareness to be broad and open, allowing absolutely anything and everything to come and go within our experience, while we 'do nothing', simply sitting there as it all unfolds.

Open awareness is a beautiful practice, but one with a couple of subtle pitfalls.

Sometimes people wonder if they're 'doing it right', because it's so hard to tell when there's 'nothing to do'. But as soon as you become aware that you're wondering if you're doing it right, you're already back in the open awareness, aware of the thoughts about whether you're meditating properly. So we can trust completely in awareness to do its thing without any interference from us, and let go deeply into the practice.

The other challenge is what's sometimes called the 'near enemy' of open awareness practice, which is a state of dullness. This is a kind of 'sinking' or 'drifting', a vague, hazy state in which the mind is subtly turned away from what's going on. It can feel vaguely pleasant, but it isn't particularly helpful. In true open awareness practice, the mind should be clear and bright, your attention turned toward your experience in all its fullness.

If you'd like to try stepping into the 'timeless now', you can find two guided open awareness practices in the Audio section of this website, one ten minutes long, the other twenty-five. Give it a try!

One of the most fundamental skills developed in meditation is the ability to focus. This is usually referred to as 'concentration', but for some people this word can conjure up ideas of striving, gut-busting effort and so on, so it might be more helpful to think of focus in terms of mental stillness, stable attention, or even simply the ability to stay with something without getting distracted. With enough practice you might even come to think of it as 'resting the mind' on an object or task, but for most beginners the experience of learning to focus doesn't feel particularly restful!

It turns out that the mind likes to be still, quiet and stable, at least once it's had some time to get used to the idea. We tend to go through life constantly absorbing new information and experiences, hyper-stimulated by adverts, music, television and the general busyness of modern society. This leaves our minds in a constant whirl of novelty, never able to rest for a minute, and so the mind habitually jumps from one thing to the next, never settling anywhere. When the mind is allowed to come to rest, however, we find that the resulting experience of peace and stillness is deeply enjoyable and profoundly nourishing. Over time and with practice, this comes to be experienced as a source of inner well-being - a place inside ourselves that we can go to experience joy and contentment, rather than always having to look outside ourselves.

Focus isn't just for sitting meditation, either. It's very helpful to cultivate a sense of being grounded - in the here and now, in our physical body and in the present moment. Many of us live most of our lives fretting about the future, regretting the past or caught up in abstract ideas about how things ought to be now. Learning to come into the present moment and stay here, without becoming distracted and wandering away into the past or the future again, is enormously helpful as we try to navigate life's ups and downs. Compared to the horrors of the past and the future's veiled threats, the present moment is usually not so bad!

Sitting meditation is one way to develop focus, but we can also use movement to explore focus and grounding together. In an informal way, it can be helpful simply to walk a little bit slower and tune in to the physical sensations of the walking - your feet on the ground, the air moving past your skin. It's important to be aware of your surroundings and notice the sights and sounds around you, of course, but learning to do that whilst remaining in touch with what's going on in your body, rather than being 'pulled out' into those external stimuli all the time, is the key to staying grounded. More formally, you can set aside a period of time for walking meditation, just as you might with sitting meditation. In walking meditation we generally choose a predetermined path - either round in a circle or back and forth in a straight line - and then walk slowly and mindfully, paying attention to the physical details of our experience (perhaps the soles of the feet on the ground, or alternatively the breath as it flows in and out of the body), for a set period of time.

A third, related, skill is what we might call embodiment. Embodiment is about how we are in the world; how we act, how we express our deepest intentions and truths, how we live in the most authentic way possible. It takes a lot to be fully embodied. We need a significant degree of grounding to provide the foundation. We also need a great deal of inner clarity (which we can reach through insight practices such as self-inquiry), and the integrity to be honest with ourselves about what we want to say and do and how we want to go about it. Finally, it takes courage to be fully embodied. Expressing that which is deepest within us can feel risky and vulnerable. But it's also hugely rewarding, and over time you'll develop a profound sense of confidence which others will instinctively recognise and respect.

Concentration is intrinsic to all meditation techniques, so it will develop simply through having a daily practice. However, it can also be useful and even fun to cultivate it more directly with a specific concentration practice. First, pick an object to focus on. Any object will do; the breath is a good one (it's very portable!), but you might also like to experiment with using a candle flame or any other visual object that you find appealing. Set a timer, bring your attention to the object, and any time you notice your attention has wandered, relax and come back to the object. And do nothing else! In concentration practice you aren't really interested in where the mind goes when it gets distracted; you're simply inclining toward the object, coming back to it again and again whenever the mind drifts away, allowing the mind to calm down and settle itself on the object of focus.

Guided concentration practice is a bit of a contradiction in terms, because the instructions tend to take the mind away from the object of focus. Nonetheless, I've recorded a ten-minute guided concentration practice with some sparse instructions scattered throughout. The main value of the instructions here is to serve as a gentle nudge if your attention has wandered far away from the object and you've become lost in distraction. You can find the guided meditation on the Audio page, but please feel free to practise without the audio as soon as you've gotten the hang of the technique.

Meditation helps us in many ways. Practising mindfulness meditation regularly helps to develop mental stability and reduce habits of reactivity which get us into trouble, and it can give us a vehicle for working with difficult emotions. Heart-opening practices such as metta and compassion help us to cultivate beautiful qualities of the heart-mind and extend those to others.

Another way meditation can help is to provide insight into our lives, by shining a light on processes which normally take place under the radar, in the unconscious or subconscious mind. For example, through regular meditation practice you might start to notice patterns that you've never consciously identified before.

• 'It seems like every time I do that, I end up feeling bad.'
• 'I had no idea how much I enjoyed doing that! I should do it more often.'
• 'When I go straight into a situation without taking time to prepare, I get flustered quickly and tend to say something silly.'

Looking a little deeper, we start to see major trends in our behaviour. We start to notice that we play many different roles in our lives. Using myself as an example, depending on the situation at the time, I might be in any of these roles:

• Friend
• Employee
• Team leader
• Teacher
• Son

Each of these roles places different demands on me and comes with the expectation of a different set of behaviours, and in some cases even different ways of dressing and speaking. As I go through a typical week, I have to shift from one role to another many times.

​Roles are not inherently good or bad by themselves; they're useful vehicles to help us relate to one another. But sometimes our relationship to our roles can be a problem. Sometimes a role demands something of us that we can't give at that moment. Sometimes we find ourselves stuck in roles that have outlived their usefulness, unable to move on. Learning to understand that roles are just roles, nothing more or less, and to be mindful of the process of inhabiting these roles in our own lives, can bring about a great loosening of tension and sense of openness, lightness and freedom.

(You might like to think about which roles you find yourself playing as you go through life. Which ones do you find particularly stressful, and why?)

Going further still, some of the deepest insights available to us in meditation practice concern more fundamental aspects of who we are and how our sense of self is constructed from moment to moment. These insights have the power to change our relationship to our own experience in fundamental ways, leading to significantly greater freedom and well-being. (This is the process sometimes called 'awakening' or 'enlightenment' in spiritual circles. In Zen we talk about 'kensho', or 'seeing one's true nature'.)

Many meditation techniques can result in insight - the key is to have a sense of investigation, inquiry, looking to see what's going on. We aren't trying to think our way to insight, to analyse ourselves and come up with a clever way of understanding what's happening; rather, we simply observe our minds, and allow the insights to come to us in an intuitive, experiential way. So insight meditation practices typically involve a technique which sets up a good environment in which insight can arise and encourages us to pay attention to see what happens next.

One very effective way to generate insight into the self is to work with the question 'Who am I?' If you'd like to try this, you can find a 10-minute 'Who am I?' meditation in the Audio section of this website. Give it a try and see what comes up for you!

In meditation circles we talk a lot about mindfulness, non-judgemental awareness, and letting things be as they are. This is a beautiful practice that can bring about a great deal of freedom and joy. For some people, though, it can be more helpful to cultivate beautiful qualities of the heart and mind directly. Fortunately, there are meditation practices which do just this.

For millennia, meditation practitioners have worked to cultivate four beneficial attributes in particular, sometimes called the 'four immeasurables' because of their priceless value. Since these practices have a long tradition behind them, you'll sometimes find them called by their Pali names. (Pali is an ancient language related to Sanskrit, and is the language of the teachings of early Buddhism.)

• Metta: Loving kindness, benevolence, well-wishing, friendliness. An attitude of wishing happiness, good health and peace of mind for yourself and others, simply because it's a good thing when people are happy, healthy and at peace.
• Karuna: Compassion. An attitude of wishing for freedom from suffering for yourself and others. Whereas metta wishes for happiness simply because happiness is a beautiful thing, compassion begins with a recognition of pain in ourselves and others, and an earnest wish for that pain to be relieved.
• Mudita: Sympathetic joy, empathetic joy. This is a feeling of joy that arises because others are joyful, even if you didn't cause their happiness. Through mudita, something in us naturally resonates at the sight of the other's joy, and so we feel it too.
• Upekkha: Equanimity, serenity, even-mindedness, stability, deep acceptance. An attitude in which we let go of all resistance to the experience that is arising in the here and now. This letting go creates the freedom to choose our actions wisely rather than reacting out of habit or impulse.

There are various ways to cultivate these qualities in meditation. One approach is to repeat certain phrases silently to ourselves in meditation: 'may this person be happy, may this person be free from suffering'. People who are more visual tend to prefer visualisations, such as imagining a golden light shining in your heart and radiating out to touch other people. Some people simply tap into a physical sense of these qualities in the body and stay with that feeling, allowing it to grow and develop over time like a carefully tended garden.

It's worth saying that, for some people, these practices can be surprisingly difficult. For some people it can feel cheesy or inauthentic to try to cultivate kindness towards someone if they don't already feel it. If this is you, that's absolutely fine - it doesn't make you a bad person! You might try giving it another go in six months (or six years!) to see if anything has shifted, but in the meantime you're much better served finding a different practice that works better for you personally. Meditation is one of the most personal activities you will ever undertake, so it's important to be honest with yourself about what you get on with rather than forcing yourself to do something you don't like because you think you 'should' do it.

One more note of caution: many people in our society already give a tremendous amount of their time, energy and love in the service of others. Occasionally, these practices can end up as a guilt trip - 'Oh, I need to give even more compassion to other people instead of taking a holiday and looking after myself!' If you're one of these people, I strongly suggest you start with loving kindness and compassion for yourself. To put it another way, put on your own oxygen mask first!

If you'd like to try out these practices, you'll find some guided meditations in the Audio section of this website. There are two each for loving kindness and compassion: one for people who are primarily auditory, using the phrases, and one for people who are primarily visual, using a golden light visualisation. If you are primarily kinesthetic, and prefer to work simply with a physical feeling of love or compassion, I suggest using the guided audio with phrases, and treat the phrases as reminders to keep checking in with that felt sense of kindness or compassion.

In my last post I talked a little bit about mindfulness, how it can help us in our busy lives, and how we can start to develop it.

Today I'd like to say something about how mindfulness can help with emotional pain, something that is all too prevalent in the modern world. Many people suffer greatly from anxiety, grief, regret, anger, worry, lack of self-esteem - the list goes on.

The mindful approach to working with difficult emotions is simple yet powerful. The key is to bring awareness and acceptance to our experience - in other words, to be mindful of what's going on for us. We are often very unwilling to look directly at our experience and see it for what it is; we have strong habits of avoidance, turning away from it, trying to distract ourselves or put on a brave face and pretend everything is fine when it isn't. Unfortunately, in the process we can end up compounding the problem - we become afraid of our fear, angry with ourselves for becoming angry, and so on.

It's important to realise that there are two aspects to any situation: the situation itself, and our relationship to that situation. If I stub my toe, my foot will hurt - that's the situation. But how do I react to it? Do I curse myself for being so clumsy, or wish that my foot didn't hurt despite all evidence to the contrary? Or can I find a way to recognise and accept the situation for what it is? In the first case, my relationship to the pain is adding negative mental activity on top of the physical experience. In the second case, there's just the pain itself - the extra burden of suffering has vanished, so the whole experience feels lighter and less difficult.

Paradoxically, bringing the non-judgemental awareness of mindfulness to our difficult emotions - looking at them without trying to change the experience at all - starts to shift our relationship to those emotions, and, over time, brings about a powerful transformation.

Working with emotions is a delicate process, and one that requires great care, patience and self-compassion. It can be helpful to think of the way you might approach a frightened animal - trying to be forceful will only make the situation worse. Being quietly, calmly present and allowing the animal to come to you in its own time is far more helpful. In the same way, we can't resolve our difficult emotions forcefully or instantaneously - we must work patiently and gently with them each time they arise, allowing them to change at their own pace.

Emotions can be powerful forces, and if we work with them on the level of the mind it's easy to get swept away. Instead, you may find it helps to work with the body. Each emotion is felt in the body as well as the mind - butterflies in the stomach, tightness in the chest, and so on. When difficult emotions arise, we can look at what's going on in the body. This allows us to turn towards the experience more easily, with less risk of getting caught up in the emotion.

Many people are not used to working with their bodies in this way. Some people even find that they aren't particularly aware of their bodies and can't feel much going on at all. The good news is that the awareness does develop over time, with practice.

A well-known meditation practice which helps to develop greater body awareness and sensitivity is the body scan. This involves moving the attention around the body from place to place, usually following a specific sequence. There are two body scan meditations - one 10 minutes long, the other 25 minutes - in the Audio section of my website. Give them a try!