​Last week I wrote about my experience with meditation. This week I have some recommendations for how to get into meditation. Remember, your mileage may vary, but here is what works for me.

1. If you’re in a city, it’s likely there are classes you can take to learn the basics of meditation. At its core, meditation is about focusing on something (usually your breath). Then, you use that focus as a stable foundation to try and stay in the moment despite the fact that your mind will wander. Finding a teacher who can get you up and running can be quite helpful.

2. Pick up some books on meditation to expand your understanding. As I mentioned in last week's post, Jon Kabat-Zinn is one of the people who help get mindfulness to the level it’s known today in America. Any of his works are quite helpful. There are many other authors out there who are well-respected leaders in mindfulness and meditation, though. Find one whose writings jibe with you.

3. Get a meditation app. There are plenty of them out there. I use one called Insight because it has many free options. Some apps include specialty meditations to help with anxiety or depression. They also include meditations to help you sleep. Most are guided, which means a teacher speaks and tells you how to breathe and what to think about while you sit there. It’s not a controlling thing, but instead gentle guidance.

4. Practice, practice, practice. The more time you put into meditating, the more results you’ll see. For me, as I meditate daily I find I remind myself to turn to my breath in moments of stress more often. It helps relieve my anxiety and calms me. Do I remember to do this all the time? No. Are all my meditation sessions enlightening, ethereal moments where I reach another consciousness? Hardly. Sometimes my mind wanders about for 15 minutes and I rarely focus on my breath or calming my mind. But I know that’s not how it is every time and that the time I’m putting in is helpful.

Have you spent any time meditating? If so, how was it? Did you find it helpful? Feel free to respond in the comments—I’m interested in hearing your thoughts.

​I’ve been meditating for over 15 years. When I was a Christian back in high school and college I thought meditation was a weird thing. I presumed only people who believed in crystals and the New Age movement meditated. As I left my faith and began to explore self-help, I realized there is much more to meditation than finding a connection with some higher power.

Through work with cognitive behavioral therapy, I came across the works of Jon Kabat-Zinn. I purchased his book Wherever You Go, There You Are. This work taught me the foundation of mindfulness. I learned the importance of breathing and how to deal with anxiety in that fashion.

From that point on, I did a lot of my own research, digging into the works of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk, and others in Buddhist thought. While I don’t consider myself a Buddhist, I find a lot of meaning in their philosophy and views of the world. As I’ve written before, I identify with the five remembrances of the Buddha and think about them daily.

I also found doing yoga for many years taught me to control my breath. I learned that my breath was something I could return to at any time or place and find some grounding in my life. I don’t want to make this sound super easy or casual—it can be difficult at times. And it takes a great deal of practice to get to the point where I can remind myself without too much trouble to breathe and find a focus that way.
 
Nowadays I try and commit somewhere from 10 to 25 minutes each day meditating. I attempt to do so in the morning but sometimes I’ll do it at night right before I go to bed. Depending on the time of day, meditating can either get me ready for the day to come or calm down so I can sleep.

In my blog post next week I’ll give some tips on how to get into meditation if it’s a new thing for you.
 
 
Like what you read? Want to have Kurt come talk to your group about belonging, loneliness, and mental health? Click here to contact him about speaking at your event.

​My actions are my only true belongings.
I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.
My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
 
In the past two entries I’ve explored things we can’t change: the way life works (illness, age, death) and other people and things. So where does that leave us? The last remembrance tells us that all we can control are our own actions.

Our response to life is the only thing we own. It’s the only thing we take with us everywhere we go at all times. Furthermore, our actions speak for us. How we act is what we fall back upon. It says who we are and what’s important to us.
 
What this remembrance means to me is that I have control over my actions. I can make that decision on how to respond to the things that happen to me. I wish I had control over more things, especially when life doesn’t seem fair.
 
There are often arrayed against us a plethora of cultural and personal barriers: racism, sexism, homophobia, mental illness, physical disability, etc. And they’re not fair. Yet, our response to them is all we can control. Part of that means we can choose to act by fighting against the systems and people that hold us back.
 
Our attitude can go a long way to determining how we view life and in turn our mental health. I acknowledge that even though we control our actions, it’s not always easy to be positive and optimistic. Life can suck and it’s up to us to get to the point with our mental health where it’s possible to see this remembrance as do-able.

It hasn’t always been simple for me to acknowledge that I have any control over my life. Often I have to fight against feeling helpless and hopeless. This happens especially when there are decisions to be made by others and I’m left waiting on their actions. But if I can confront and work on my mental illness, I find the remembrance that I only have control over my behavior to be a reasonable one to address.

Attempting to take on my own mental health and deal with it is an action in itself. It’s an action that says I’m trying and shows what I’m made of. This is a consequence that I’m willing to accept. 

​All that is dear to me and everyone I love are the nature to change.
There is no way to keep from being separated from them.
 
The remembrances of the Buddha shift with the fourth statement. They’re not facts of human existence (aging, illness, death), but rather an acknowledgement of the outward changes in our environment. With this statement we move away from the self and to speak of others.
 
I’m pretty good with accepting getting older, sicker, and dying. But it’s change with others and my situation that has often caused me the most trouble. Sudden, dramatic changes can throw me for a loop. The end of a relationship can especially do this. When my girlfriend dumped me in 2011 it hit me hard, especially considering we had only been going out for five months. So much so that I tried to kill myself. Looking back now I find it amazing this was my reaction, but I’ve learned that losing close connections to others is a triggering experience for me.
 
Nowadays I remind myself that when change occurs, it’s a matter of how the world works. I don’t always like it, but what can I do to stop it? Others’ actions caused change in my life that has disappointed and scared me. Just the same, I’m sure I’ve caused change in their lives that has made them uncomfortable.
 
But if I take a step back and look at the full scope of my life, I see that disruption and change are the nature of my existence. People move, you get laid off from a job, pets die. I’ve learned now that the fact of the matter is that most of your relationships will end, until there’s one that doesn’t. The closeness we have with our family and friends may change as we move and grow in our lives. These are inevitable. Look at not only your life, but the lives of others you know. No doubt major changes have occurred with all them.

It’s a daily struggle to accept that things don’t stay the same. With each new thought of frustration about things out of our control, we have to take up that struggle once again to come to some tolerance of our situation. Life isn’t always out of our hands, though. We do have a way to handle these frustrating experiences when they occur. The final remembrance of the Buddha has helped me a great deal and I’ll explore that in the next post.

I am of the nature to grow old.
There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill health.
There is no way to escape ill health.

I am of the nature to die.
There is no way to escape death.

The first three remembrances of the Buddha come off as pretty big bummers. You get old, you get sick, and you die. I brought up the remembrances to some family members and they stared at me in disbelief. There was a long pause and then one of them said, "Wow. That is really depressing." I understood why they might think that, but since I discovered them years ago, I have come to find them freeing.

A certain level of acceptance is necessary to find peace with these first three remembrances. But let's face it: we can all agree we're going to age, become ill, and die, right? That's the nature of this life and there's no way around that. Once I learned that that was the way of things, I knew there was no reason to fight it. And I saw how much unhappiness arose not only in me, but others, when we can't be the young healthy people we desire.
 
I've come to peace that this is how my life is going to go. Does it mean that I like getting older, ill, or the thought that my loved ones (and I myself) will someday die? Not really. But what can I do about it? I can have empathy for those experiencing times of illness or who are going through the death of a loved one. And I can listen and love them when they're frustrated that the strength of their youth has gone from them.

Once there's an acknowledgment of the way life works (aging, illness, death) we can turn to accepting them. That acceptance is a daily struggle. It requires constant patience (which is one of my weak traits). But what does fighting against these constants in life get us? It can often cause us sadness, despair, and frustration, which doesn't help things.

I will be the first to acknowledge this isn't easy to accept. And that it comes off as a major downer. But I can also tell you that learning to accept that life operates this way has brought me a great deal of patience and humility.
 
It's also helped me avoid situations that might otherwise exasperate my depression and anxiety. There are times I’ve fallen ill with the flu or an injury from being physically active. Those situations leave me wondering if I’m at the beginning of some greater, more serious illness. It also leads me to sadness at not being able to do everything I want to do. Yet, when I reflect on the remembrances, I acknowledge that such events are a given in life. There’s nothing I can do but accept it and adjust my behavior accordingly.
 
So, I've addressed some of the bigger forces at work in our world—things that have been upon us since the dawn of humankind. But what about the nature of other humans? How do we deal with them and how freaking annoying they can be? That's material for the next blog post.

​I’m not a Buddhist and have no intention of becoming one, but do appreciate many of the teachings and have found them useful. The one I return to daily is something called the Five Remembrances of the Buddha. There are many translations of it, but the one I like is by Thích Nhất Hạnh, a Buddhist monk:

I am of the nature to grow old.
There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill health.
There is no way to escape ill health.
 
I am of the nature to die.
There is no way to escape death.
 
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are the nature to change.
There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings.
I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.
My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

I shared these with some people recently and they found them to be very depressing. I can see how one might draw that conclusion. Looked at from a certain perspective it appears to be saying that life is a big bummer and then you die. Nothing is going to stay the same. Everyone and everything is going to change. Sounds shitty, doesn’t it?

Yet, I find that the Five Remembrances have cut down on my anxiety. I need facts in my life—foundational ideas that cannot change. I need to be able to know there’s something I can rely on. I’ve thought about these five things and realized that they are true and unchangeable. They will always be there. And thus, they’re something I can believe in.
 
The Five Remembrances also encourage me to live in the moment and get out of my head. And they’re important (and confusing) enough to be worthy of exploration in future posts.