Since I started meditating almost two years ago now, I’ve had some people ask about my practice. Having picked up my daily practice again over the past few months, I thought that I’d write a short post about it. This is a practice that I was taught during my time studying at Cambridge and, despite trying various other practices, I find that I always come back to this one. I am grateful to my teacher at Cambridge for introducing me to the practice and for patiently guiding a group of us through things over the course of 8 weeks. I now hope that I can pass on some things that I have learned to others.

The practice itself

Firstly, I find a chair to sit on, where I can sit in a position similar to that shown in the image below. During the practice, because I’m trying to develop focus, whilst also remaining mindful, if I feel myself slouching or my posture becoming poor, I will calmly readjust my posture back to this position. This is important as it allows you to be in a nice open position, which will help with the breathing but also with feeling comfortable during the meditation. I also believe that an element of this practice is developing resilience to sit with good posture for some time.

Meditation posture courtesy of Quora.com.

So, now that we are sitting comfortably in a chair (or anything that allows you to maintain a posture similar to above), we are ready to start the meditation practice. The eyes are already closed and, initially, I breathe naturally, just trying to ease into the posture and to centre myself. At this point, it’s important to make sure that you are breathing fully. I check that my stomach rises and falls with every inhale and exhale as we want to be breathing diaphragmatically, not just from the chest. Something important to note is that the breathing during the practice should be soft. Unless I have a cold or a blocked nose, I barely hear my own breath. All breathing should be done through the nose, keeping the mouth shut throughout the practice.

The longest of counting

Now, having found a good posture, I slowly elongate the breath until, after a few breaths, I reach my longest comfortable breath. This will be around 80% of your ‘maximum’ breath. It should feel long, but one should not be gasping for air during each breath. This breath now becomes the longest breath, and I begin the longest of counting. Maintaining my longest comfortable breath, I start counting from 1 to 9 on the inhale and then down from 9 to 1 on the exhale. I like to visualise the numbers (with my eyes still shut) appearing and then fading away. It helps me to focus on the numbers. Throughout the practice, I aim to try not to hold on to any thoughts that arise. My goal is to simply observe any thoughts and feelings that arise, and to try to allow them to slowly distil and fade out. Not clinging onto them, but also not forcefully trying to push them away. So, now that I’m performing the longest of counting, I usually keep doing this for around 5-10 minutes. I never time my meditations, so it always differs, but I find this first ‘phase’ of the practice a good opportunity to settle the mind and to tune into the body. Once I feel like this has started happening, I transition to the next part of the practice.

The longer of counting

After the longest of counting, the next ‘phase’ is the longer of counting. Now, the breath becomes a little shorter as we move from counting up and down from 1 to 9, to counting up from 1 to 6 and then back down again from 6 to 1. The rate of counting is kept the same, which leads to a shorter breath. Again, I continue this for a similar amount of time to the longest of counting, before transitioning to the next part of the practice.

The shorter of counting

The last part of the practice that involves counting (at least most of the time for me) is the shorter of counting, where we transition to counting up from 1 to 3 and then back down from 3 to 1 again. Again, this will naturally shorten the breath once more, as the rate of counting is kept constant. I continue this for a similar amount of time to the first two ‘phases’.

Having done the counting part of the practice, the next part is to slowly let go of the counting and, ultimately, the breath.

Following the breath through the body

Next, I maintain the same breath as during the shorter of counting, but now let go of the counting. Often, I am still somewhat counting in the back of my mind, but the focus should no longer be on counting from 1 to 3, but instead we shift our focus to being only on the breath. On the inhale, I follow the breath in through the nose and down through the body into the stomach. On the exhale, I follow the breath as it travels out from my stomach, up through my body, and out through my nose. I usually try to do this part of the meditation for up to 5 minutes, depending on how much time I have to hand. The next step is to develop further focus.

Feeling the breath at the tip of the nose

I now transition from following the breath through my body to focusing only on the very tip of my nose. Remember, the breath is very soft, so I usually have to really tune into the breadth passing the skin on the tip of my nose, but if I develop enough focus, I can feel it. It’s nice to observe the difference between the air coming in and the air going out. The difference in temperature between the air. I continue like this again usually for a slightly shorter amount of time, likely up to around 3 minutes.

Letting go of the breath

Finally, having become more focused, I then let go of the breath. My goal is to be completely at peace during this stage of the practice, but still having the mindfulness to maintain a good posture and to be aware of my surroundings. I try not to notice the breath and often find it useful to envision a black dot appearing at the start of this ‘phase’ and then slowly dissolving into nothingness - trying not to visualise anything in particular. I then continue like this for a few minutes.

Reversing back to the start

Once I have sat in the final stage for a few minutes, I then reverse the above until I arrive back at the longest of counting. I usually spend less time in each phase on the way back up, but it is important to go through each in turn to make sure that I’m practicing correctly. After arriving back at the longest of counting and spending some time there, I return my breath back to normal. Then, keeping my eyes shut and staying in the meditation posture, I recollect a feeling that I had during the practice and try to feel that again. Often, I gently smile whilst doing this. Finally, I place my palms over my eyes and gently open my eyes before taking my palms away. At the moment, the practice takes me around 30 minutes, but you can make it last however long you like. However, I would suggest a minimum of 10 minutes every day to be able to notice the effects of the practice. My goal is to build up to an hour or so.

I have summarised the practice in the diagram below. Sometimes, I will take a different ‘route’ through the stages, but it’s important to follow the right progression. For example, I might only shorten the breath to counting up and down to 6 before moving to following the breath, following at the tip of the nose, and then letting go. Essentially, go across the numbers at the top of the grid first and then follow a column down the grid as far as you’d like, before returning back to the starting point in the reverse of what you did to arrive at that point.

A summary of my meditation practice.

That’s my meditation practice at the moment. I hope that it can be useful to someone, but, if not, it will be nice to look back to see how my practice progresses over the years. For anyone who hasn’t meditated before, I highly recommend doing so. However, I would like to point out that meditation is not something that is a miracle cure that fixes all of our problems over night. It’s a practice - one that needs to be done regularly to reap the rewards. And, for me, even if those rewards aren’t clear at first, I think that simply sitting with your own thoughts for some time every day is good for the soul. By sitting and meditating every day, the habit gets etched into my day. Some days I only sit for 5 minutes, but others I sit for over half an hour.

If you are just starting, I suggest incrementally adding each step highlighted above over a few weeks. Start off just with the longest of counting for 5-10 minutes. Then, after a few days/sessions of this, try adding the longer of counting. Over time, keep adding the next stage once you become comfortable with the current one until you are practicing all of the steps above.

Please email me if you have any questions. Thank you for reading, Elis.