Meditation is yet another word that is hard to pin down, but I think of it as cultivating the skill of centering attention on the here and now, of training attention away from habits of distraction and toward clear perception of the present-moment flow of experience. There are many ways meditation is taught and practiced, with perhaps the most well-known being mindfulness, which Jon Kabat-Zinn defines as: “Paying attention in a particular way: On purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”
While I have a little bit of formal training in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction through Duke Integrative Medicine, most of my experience in meditation comes from years of informal practicing and experimenting going back to about 1994, when I was studying East/West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
These days I am particularly interested in the perspectives of Sam Harris and Shinzen Young. Sam Harris’s Waking Up app has a philosophical yet practical vibe that particularly resonates with me, while Shinzen Young has developed a super-detailed, systematic approach to meditation called Unified Mindfulness that is fascinating and illuminating.
Meditation resources:
- Wonderfully described, down-to-earth tips on how to get started with a meditation practice, via Tim Ferriss
- Dan Harris: Hack your brain’s default mode with meditation
- Sam Harris on mindfulness