How to cultivate a practice of sitting in silent meditation

You do not have to spend hours sitting in silence for the benefits to be realized.  Starting with just five or ten minutes a day is enough to start.  The trick is training ourselves to be silent!  Our mind has a job to do and it is pretty good at it.  So the first thing you will notice when you sit down to be silent is it does not seem like you can stop thinking about things!  But it is not so much that we want to force ourselves to stop thinking, it is more a process of not paying attention to or dwelling on the thoughts.  Anyone who wants to can cultivate silence.  Like anything we learn, it just takes practice. 

Here are a few tips for cultivating your silence:

• Identify a quiet time that you can use each day to sit in silence ... like just before leaving for work or after work or at 10 am  ...  same time every day.  Whatever time works for you.

• Find a comfortable chair to sit in  ...  a chair is good to start with.  If you lay down you might just fall asleep  ...  but if you fall asleep in the chair, well that is ok too!  In the beginning you may think that you are falling asleep.

• Sit down with the intention of relaxing and meditating or sitting in silence the same time in the same place every day ... feet flat on the floor (or sit in the cross-legged position), hands resting comfortably in your lap.

• Close your eyes and start with slow deep breaths.  Breathe in through the nose, exhale through the mouth, imagining any stress or tension flowing out as you breathe out.  Relaxing your body as you breathe.

• Create a focus in your mind that you can always return your attention to like a blank board or a tree or even just focusing on your breath going in and out.

• When you catch yourself thinking about something, anything, just return your mind to your focus.

• Be gentle to yourself.  Catching yourself thinking a lot is the first phase of retraining your mind to relax a bit.

• The more you practice the same time, same place every day, the easier it will get.  Your subconscious will kick in and say "Oh!  It is that time and place.  Time to relax."  And it will get easier.  After a while you will be able to do it anywhere, even if there is noise around!

Enjoy your new inner peace! 

If you would like to learn more about sitting in silence meditation and the human energy system join us at one of our meditation classes!