Meditation: Steadying the Mind

Almost everything in this teaching asks one thing of the mind: that it can put its attention somewhere and keep it there. Without that, a glimpse of what you are slips away, and old reflexes take over before you notice them.

Meditation is what builds this capacity. It trains the mind to settle, to focus, and to stay with one thing more and more deeply. It is the one formal sitting practice in this series — a few minutes each day, sitting still — and what it builds carries into everything else you do.

The word has been used in recent years to mean many things. Relaxation. Mindfulness. Stress reduction. Those are useful, but they are not what the Gita means.

In this teaching, meditation is the gradual training of the mind. Usually the mind is restless, reactive, dragged from thought to thought. Meditation takes it to where it can be: quiet enough to hold attention on one thing without slipping.

This is not a single technique. It is a continuum. At one end is the most basic calming. At the other is the ability to hold attention on whatever you choose, for as long as you choose, without your mind running off. The whole of that span is meditation.

Meditation is tailored to the meditator. A teacher meets each person where they are. They give what is useful at that point in the person's life, and let the practice deepen at the pace the mind allows. A very agitated mind cannot do what an already-quiet mind can. Neither does a quiet mind need what the agitated mind needs.

What follows traces that continuum, so you have a sense of where you might begin and what comes after.

For a mind that is highly agitated — too restless to acknowledge ishvara in the morning, too jumpy to stop staking its worth on every outcome during the day — meditation begins as something simple.

Sit comfortably. Close your eyes. Take long, slow breaths in and out. Keep a mental count and make sure that the exhale is longer than the inhale. That is the whole instruction.

You are not trying to concentrate on the breath. You are not trying to keep your attention from drifting. You are simply breathing slowly and deeply. The thinking mind can do whatever it wants. Thoughts will come. Plans, worries, memories. Let them.

The reason this works is physical. Slow breathing, with a long out-breath, calms the body. The heart rate drops. The body comes out of its alert, scanning mode. This is well established, not just a teaching claim. As the body settles, the thoughts thin out on their own, without your having to manage them.

After just a few minutes of slow breathing, a mind that could not hold still earlier can hold still now. Not because you forced it. Because the body underneath it has calmed down.

When the body has calmed and the breathing is no longer effortful, the practice can deepen.

You no longer need the long slow breaths. Sit, and let your attention move from the body to what the mind is doing.

Thoughts come. About yesterday. About tomorrow. About what someone said. About what you should be doing instead. Watch them.

Do not chase them. Do not push them away. Let them come and go. Notice that they appear in you — in the awareness the earlier pieces pointed to — and that you are no more disturbed by their coming and going than the sky is by the clouds that pass through it.

The mechanism here is different from the breathing. Earlier, the body calmed and the thoughts thinned as a side effect. Here, you are doing something the mind does not naturally do: observing thoughts rather than being carried by them. Over weeks and months of this, the grip of the thoughts on your attention loosens. You are not adding anything. You are not subtracting anything. You are watching, and the watching itself changes the relationship.

When the mind has grown quieter through watching, the practice can deepen again.

You pick one thing to hold your attention on. The breath, this time deliberately. Or a sound. Or an image. Or a word. The Gita advises you to put your thoughts with ishvara. You can hold its personified form, if you prefer, or contemplate it as the cosmic intelligence it is.

The tradition's simplest way of doing this is japa: silently repeating a name of ishvara, or the syllable Om, again and again, at an unhurried pace. The Gita singles it out. Among all forms of worship, Krishna says, I am japa. Each repetition gives the wandering mind a place to come back to.

The point is the holding itself. Keep your attention for a few minutes. Then longer. When it slips, bring it back. The bringing back is the work.

This is the kind of attention that real inquiry will need. It is what the meditation continuum is ultimately heading toward.

These three movements are not steps you march through in order. They describe how meditation tends to deepen as the mind grows more capable. Some practitioners start with deep breathing and stay there for years. Some, with already-quiet minds, can go almost directly to holding attention. Most move along the continuum gradually, with periods of going back when life becomes difficult and the body needs calming again.

Meditation is not only what happens when you sit. The capacity you are building — to keep your attention where you choose — travels with you into the rest of your day. Into the meeting. Into the conversation. Into the task. Into the moment of difficulty. The sitting is the gym. Life is where the strength gets used.

Here is what all of this looks like once it has matured.

You take a difficult phone call — a colleague is angry, the matter is unresolved, and you would rather not be in this conversation.

A mind that has been living as these pieces describe, for some time, meets this moment differently.

You hold steady attention on what is actually being said, not on your reaction to it. You stop privately keeping score of how the call ought to turn out, and let the outcome belong to the situation rather than to your self-image. You meet the caller with care, as someone who is also ishvara, the difficulty included.

None of this is decided in the moment. There is no checklist being run. It is simply how a mind responds once it has lived this way long enough: steady, unclenched, and kind.

Begin where you are. None of this needs to be hurried.