How to get better at meditation?

5 Tips to develop a good foundation for your meditation practice.

Are you struggling with your meditation practice? Do you feel that meditating is just not doing it for you?
Don't give up just yet! Meditation is a journey. It's much more than just sitting on a cushion. If you want to get better at meditating, there are different types of meditation that you can practice throughout your journey and keep developing over time.

However, it is also very important to build a good foundation to be able to meditate with ease. You may be surprised about these techniques that seem to not be directly related to your practice, but in the long run they will be immensely helpful to get better at meditation and have a peaceful mind.

In this article we will focus on how you can build a good foundation for meditation and for any other mindfulness practice. If you are able to implement these 5 exercises in your daily routine, you will be able to focus much better on your meditation practice and find more peace in your everyday life overall.
BONUS: These tips don't just apply to meditation. They are very important to be successful at any practice in life and they are very helpful to better achieve your goals in all areas.

Highlights

“Meditating is much more than just sitting on a cushion”

Different types of meditation

Before we will have a closer look at each of the 5 tips on how to get better at your meditation, it is helpful to also understand the difference between the following 2 types of meditation:

While mental concentration helps you to be more focused overall, insight meditation helps to understand the changing nature of life and to develop your wisdom. If you just practice concentration meditation, it is definitely better than not meditating at all. It grows awareness and mindfulness, and it often helps to get rid of stressful situations for the time being.

However, in order to develop a deeper understanding and lasting peace of mind, it’s important to also practice insight meditation. Only then we can develop our wisdom. It leads to a more successful way of meditation as a whole, and at the same time it helps to develop a peaceful mind.

Yet, it’s rather difficult to do any kind of meditation without a good foundation.

If you are just sitting on a cushion, it’s very difficult to do your meditation practices regularly and with ease. So, here are 5 tips how you can build up a better foundation altogether.

5 Tips on how to BETTER meditate

1. Associate Yourself With Good People

Surrounding yourself with good people might seem rather obvious. However, many times we walk through life on autopilot and simply accept that things and people are part of our life without even questioning their purpose.

Pedram Shojai, OMD, writes in his book The Art of Stopping Time: “Your time is the measure of your life force, and it’s all you have. Spending it recklessly with people who don’t serve and support your mission in life is an easy way to feel empty, drained and derailed. If you sense that the days are going by and you are not feeling better or getting closer to your goals, it is time to investigate and find where the time is leaking.”

Try to associate yourself with good people who help you to remove bad states of your mind and who help you to develop good qualities in life.

For example, if you are angry at someone, a good friend will tell you to think about the positive sides of that person who you are angry with, rather than feeding your anger and reinforcing your bad thoughts. This might sound weird at first because we usually expect our friends to agree with our state of mind, especially when it’s anger or any other negative thought.

Doesn’t it usually make us feel better when someone joins the gossip talk about a co-worker we had just argued with? Or aren’t we happy when our best friend agrees with all the trash talk about our ex-boyfriend?

… sounds familiar? 😉 That’s totally normal because our mind seeks for validation of our own reality, and it makes us feel better when we receive the assurance about our very own reality at that very moment.

However, we should remember that humans are genuinely good people, and we all make mistakes in life. Sometimes we just cannot prevent any wrongdoing even though we didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Yet, our mind automatically focuses on the negative things rather than the good things, and thus we get angry and have an unsettled mind.

No one is perfect and we all make mistakes. That’s simply natural!

This doesn’t mean that you have to agree with anyone’s misbehavior, or that you can’t tell a person that they hurt you or did something wrong, but it’s not helpful to get angry about it and putting yourself in an unhealthy state of mind.

Therefore, a good friend will help you to focus on the good qualities of the person you are angry with, so you can remove the anger from your mind. A good friend will support your positive thinking rather than feeding your negative thoughts, and thus it will help you to have a more peaceful mind after all.

2. Be Virtuous

Being virtuous may seem like a rather old fashioned and massive word. However, it simply means to refrain from any activity that causes you to be regretful or feel remorse afterwards. It’s about knowing and following your morals, and then protecting your actions accordingly – both, physically and verbally.

This may seem like common sense to you, especially when it’s related to the general precepts that I mention above. However, when you start being more mindful of your physical and verbal actions throughout the day, you may realize that there is always some kind of improvement that can be done here and there – even if it’s just one bad word or some joke that might hurt someone. This way you can prevent any misbehavior before it even happens and prevent any negative state of mind (regrets, shame, etc..) afterwards.

It will not only protect your own peace and happiness, but also that of others!

If you are more mindful of your physical and verbal actions, you can avoid many bad deeds in your life, and in turn it will help you to become more virtuous by developing kindness, honesty and integrity. All this can then lead to a more peaceful mind as well.

3. Make an Effort

This again may seem like a rather obvious practice because society and the nature of life have taught us that we usually have to work hard and make an effort for anything we want to achieve and get better at in life. However, this can easily be forgotten when it comes to our mental health. In order to develop a strong and healthy mind, we continuously should thrive for a wholesome state of mind. We should try to make an effort to do the following:

1) PREVENT any unwholesome states of mind
Try to prevent harmful thoughts from even arising in your mind in the first place. Make an effort to understand the negative results that will result from being in a harmful state of mind (i.e. being angry, jealous,… ). If you are more mindful of the consequences, it will help you to prevent these thoughts from arising in the first place.
2) REMOVE any unwholesome states of mind
Try to remove harmful thoughts when they have already arisen. Make an effort to detect any unwholesome state of mind and stop feeding your negative thoughts. Be mindful of them and acknowledge the negative thoughts but try not to attach to them and not letting them take over your mind. Usually when you acknowledge a specific thought or emotion that has arisen, it already becomes less intense, and you can then mindfully release it.
3) CULTIVATE any wholesome states of mind
Try to develop positive thoughts and good qualities you may not already have or need to strengthen. Make an effort to do good deeds as often as possible and develop good qualities like compassion and empathy for example. The more we cultivate wholesome states of our mind, the less capacity it has for any unwholesome states.
4) MAINTAIN a flawless wholesome state of mind
- Try to maintain your good qualities and your wholesome state of mind. Even if you are already a very kind, compassionate, helpful, wise person, make an effort to keep practicing good deeds and constantly developing your skills and your mind. For example, if you feel like you have already reached a peaceful life through meditation, don’t stop right then and rather keep up the good work! 😉

4. Have Meaningful Conversations

Similar to associating yourself with good people, it is very helpful to continuously seek deep and meaningful conversations. This will lead to developing your personal growth and wisdom. Thus, try to be mindful of the countless conversations you have during a day and truly ask yourself: Are all of these conversations really serving my purpose?

Of course every interaction and conversation with another human being has some kind of meaning because everyone in this world has a unique perspective, which can always change our point of view as well. However, within just one day we can get quite overwhelmed with endless information throughout countless conversations (not just in person but also on TV, on the radio, through social media, podcasts, books, and even the looong, destructive conversations we have with our own self sometimes).

Most of the time we are not even listening to these “conversations” very mindfully anyway, and we should be more aware to see those beautiful, deep and heartfelt conversations that bring meaning to our life.

Make it a habit to seek conversations that align with your values and your purpose.

Consequently, be more mindful of the conversations that may waste your time. Ask yourself where you could possibly cut down on rather trivial conversations and information overload, and focus on improving your deeper and meaningful conversations that will truly serve your purpose.

5. Develop Wisdom

This is probably much easier said than done! Wisdom develops over time and it keeps evolving throughout our entire life. It’s something that cannot just be studied from a book like a new language or a math problem.

For me, wisdom is a continuous journey of learning, questioning, understanding, experiencing and feeling life as it is. It’s the endless growth in our life until we eventually take our last breath.

Wisdom is about keeping an open mind, listening to other points of view, and using good judgement – with compassion for all human beings.

In Buddhism and mindfulness meditation, wisdom can be developed by removing any unwholesome states of your mind and by understanding the impermanence of life.

To remove any unwholesome states of mind, we should try to associate ourselves with good people, protect our verbal and physical actions, make an effort to keep a wholesome state of mind, and seek meaningful conversations.

So, if you practice the above 4 exercises, you will get be able to better remove unwholesome states from your mind, and with that you will develop wisdom.

If you practice impermanence meditation, it is also very helpful to remove your ignorance about the impermanence of life, and with that your wisdom develops. Furthermore, cultivating loving-kindness and practicing gratitude can be helpful to develop wisdom as well.

When you are able to continuously develop your wisdom, it will help you to gain more clarity in life which will lead to a calm and peaceful mind.

At last, I will let you in on a little secret as well. Considering the above 5 foundations, which one do you think is the most important of them all?

… drum roll please….

The most important practice out of these 5 foundations is # 1.

Buddha says: ‘If you wish to develop the last 4 foundations, you need to associate yourself with noble people! If you have a good friend, that friend will help you to become a virtuous person, which will drive you to make an effort to keep a wholesome mind; and with noble friends you can have proper conversations that will help to develop your wisdom. Noble friends will advise you in respectable ways to cultivate your good qualities and help you to remove your suffering in life”

CONCLUSION

So, are you now wondering how these 5 practices are actually helping you to get better at meditating, or how they form a good foundation for meditation?

As mentioned above, all these practices are aimed at removing unwholesome states of your mind, and thus you can develop a calm and peaceful mind overall. With this foundation you will have the right mindset to simply sit on a cushion and practice your mediation at ease. The more we are able to calm our mind in various situations, the better we can become at any of our meditation practices on a whole.

However, you will have to practice these 5 foundations in your day-to-day life, not by sitting on a cushion! 😉

These 5 foundations are actually a part of insight meditation. So, you are already practicing some kind of meditation while you are following these 5 exercises throughout your everyday life. And therefor, it’s a win-win-situation because you are naturally getting better at your concentration meditation by practicing insight meditation.

This is also very helpful to not end up with just one routine of meditation because it is very good to change up your meditation once in a while. If we practice the same kind of meditation all the time, we won’t be able to develop our mind.

So, now build up your foundation with these 5 exercises, and keep switching your routine by using concentration meditation and insight meditation throughout your entire journey. Over time a lot of these practices will become much easier and totally natural to you, and they will then simply be part of your daily routine.

So, you can make your whole life a meditation! 🙂

TOP 10 LEARNINGS

Concentration meditation helps you to be more focused and get rid of stress for the time being.
Insight meditation helps to develop a deeper understanding of life and a lasting peaceful mind.
In order to do any kind of meditation, you need a good foundation.
Surrounding yourself with good people will help to remove your negative thinking and support your purpose in life.
Good actions - both, physically and verbally - will not just protect your own peace and happiness, but also that of others.
If you make an effort to keep a wholesome mind, there is less room for having an unwholesome mind.
Meaningful conversations are supporting personal growth and help to develop wisdom.
Choose your conversations wisely and be fully present for each conversation.
In order to get better at meditation and do it with ease, keep practicing the 5 foundations.
Switch up your routine by using a mix of concentration meditation and insight meditation.

Do you want to learn more about meditation and mindfulness?

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