Three Meditation Tips

The first two meditation tips that follow are somewhat common ideas. But be sure to read the third one, especially if you have a problem with thoughts intruding too much into your meditating session.

1. Use Technology

It may be better to meditate the usual way, sitting in a quiet place and using various techniques to quiet your mind. On the other hand, it can't hurt to try brainwave entrainment CDs and other meditation recordings. They can either replace the traditional methods or supplement them.

2. Schedule Meditation

One of the primary reasons that people fall away from doing meditation daily is because they don't schedule it. If you meditate at the same time every day it becomes a part of your daily routine, and it is much easier to maintain the practice. Mornings are best for many people, but find out what time works best for you with a bit of experimentation.

3. Set Aside Thoughts

It is difficult to set aside worries, memories and daydreams when meditating, but there is a memory technique that can help. Called the Loci Technique, it involves using places to remember items on a list. You first establish ten or so places that are real. These could be your front door, your front closet, the stove, the deck, and so on. Once you have your place-list firmly in mind (it helps if the places are in order, so you can mentally walk by them one after another), you simply associate an item to be remembered with a place, using unusual imagery.

This technique is often used to remember grocery lists or to-do lists. For example, you might see ice cream being thrown against the front door in your mind, then open the closet to see dancing carrots, then see cat food on the stove burning up, and then imagine huge birds picking at bread on the deck. When you arrive at the grocery store, you mentally walk through your places and easily remember to get ice cream, carrots, cat food, and bread.

How does this help meditation? In my experience, one of the problems with distracting thoughts is that some of them demand a resolution of sorts. You need to call someone, for example, and you are afraid you won't remember later, or you forgot to leave money for the kids school lunches on the counter. You can't resolve such things completely at the moment you are meditating, but the memory technique effectively gives you a way to "set aside" the thoughts, with the assurance that you will be able to deal with them later.

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