A Guide to Sitting Still

There’s a part of you that thinks, and a part of you that watches the thinking. Most of the time you can’t tell the difference — the thoughts feel like you. Meditation teaches you to decouple the flow of thoughts from the part of you that observes them.

The practice builds toward this in stages. Over time, you can work your way into deeper states of focus.

The setup

Sit in a chair with decent support, where your feet rest comfortably on the floor. Your hands can rest on your legs, or you can hold them together like a cup. Alternatively, you can lie on your back, arms to your sides.

How to use this guide

You don’t need to follow these in a linear order, and you’re not expected to get through all of them in a single session. These are exercises you build up to over time, the way you’d build any muscle.

In the beginning, you may not get past the first one; later on, you may be able to move between them effortlessly. Don’t rush through them — when you enter one, give it the time it deserves. Only move on once you’ve sat with it.

On wandering thoughts

The wandering thought is inevitable. Trying to fight it only causes frustration, and further distraction.

You must treat your thoughts like a patient teacher would — never scolding for getting distracted. Simply acknowledge that you’ve gotten off track, recognize that your thoughts have whisked you away, and come back to the breath.

This will happen, but it’s okay. Success is not the absence of distraction. It’s noticing you’ve drifted and bringing yourself back.

Body scan

Begin by simply observing sensations in your body. Start at your feet, the feeling of light pressure as they rest on the ground. Scan through your legs, waist, abdomen, arms; don’t rush it, but observe the details. How does the fabric of your clothes feel on your skin? How does the breeze in the room feel?

I also listen for background noise — the quietest sound, the most distant one I can find.

The abdomen

Breathe in a calm and unhurried manner, at whatever depth feels natural. Focus on the feeling in your abdomen, in your diaphragm, as you breathe. Observe the sensation of the skin on your abdomen becoming taut as air fills your diaphragm, and observe it relaxing as it leaves.

Think of it as tree trunk breathing — the stable center everything else moves around.

At first, your thoughts will carry you away like a storm, again and again. But eventually, they lose their grip, and grow quiet. When thoughts do arise, they’re distant, and float away easily as your attention settles deeper into the breath.

Sometimes, I experience it almost like I’m parachuting down to earth; my thoughts are the clouds, and the longer I sit, the more my breath — the ground — fills my attention.

The nostrils

The next object of focus is breath through the nose. It sounds trivial, but it isn’t. You want to pay attention to the sensation of air right when it enters your nostrils, where it feels ever so slightly cool. Again, with a steady breath - not rapid and shallow, not abnormally deep, but regular, steady, and calm.

Some days you may find it difficult to maintain focus here; that’s okay. Be patient with your mind. Lead it back to the breath, no matter how many times it wanders. But if you find yourself struggling to stay here still, then go back to abdomen breathing to stabilize yourself.

The thoughts themselves

This one is a bit unintuitive, and is difficult to maintain without practice in the earlier exercises: your thoughts become the object of meditation.

Think of tree pose in yoga. At first, you’re wobbly — you keep your arms low, your gaze fixed on one point. That point is your breath. As you build strength, you can stretch outward, extending your arms, lifting your gaze, allowing yourself to observe what’s around you without being pulled or swayed by it.

In earlier stages, your thoughts will pull you off balance. You come back to the breath, plant yourself again, and stay low. But in this stage, you’re steady enough to look around. Thoughts come and go the way sensations do, or the feeling of your breath. You notice them, but don’t become attached.

What you find at the bottom

That decoupling I mentioned at the start — it sounds abstract until you feel it. You sit with your breath long enough, and at some point the thoughts are just there, the way traffic noise is there. Still happening, but no longer yours in the way you assumed. The observer was always separate. Meditation just makes the separation visible.