I've been meditating since 2007. I was living in San Francisco, and my brother asked if I would do some meditation with him. The first time we did it, we sat for 2 hours. Anyone who has ever tried meditation knows how insane it is to attempt 2 hours on the first try. That was all my brother. He was someone who loved doing things excessively, and he didn't believe in slow starts. I don't know how we did it. I remember stopping after one hour to move our bodies and stretch a little before resuming again for another hour. We didn't even know what we were supposed to be doing. We just sat in silence with our own thoughts. When we got up, it was time for dinner. As we were walking down to Chinatown to get some pho, I had the most incredible feeling of alertness and presence. The quality of my consciousness had been altered considerably, almost as if I had taken some entheogen. I was amazed at how this transformation could have occurred simply by sitting with one's thoughts and feelings. My brother and I continued exploring this world of meditation. We went to the San Francisco Zen Centre and asked the nuns to recommend some books. Without hesitation, a senior nun told us to start with Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I began teaching myself how to meditate by reading this enigmatic book. It is not a straightforward instruction manual. There are many passages that don't make sense until you begin sitting and comparing your experience to what he is trying to point towards. Going back and forth between the book and my own experience of meditation required a bit of work, but the effort was worth it. It turned me into a serious student of meditation. Later, I found another wonderful book by Kyōshō Uchiyama called Opening the Hand of Thought. This was both practical and philosophical, and helped me continue developing my meditation practice. The central image is that of the mind which is always grasping, and meditation allows it to relax and loosen. For some reason, I've always preferred meditating on my own, and have not found a sangha (or community) to practice together with. I've appreciated meditation as something I can do anytime, in the comfort of my own home, without depending on anyone else's schedule. One of the best ways I found to practise was the simple one of counting with each inhale or exhale, and trying to reach the number 10 without being distracted by a thought. If I caught myself being distracted, I would start again from 1. Initially, it was very difficult to get to 10. But eventually, my ability to concentrate improved, and I found this to be a very effective way to achieve focus. This became my go-to method for years. Recently, I read a book called Our Pristine Mind by Orgyen Chowang. I was intrigued when I saw that George Saunders, the short story writer, had regarded it very highly. I enjoyed the metaphor of wiping our awareness clean to reveal our underlying pristine mind, and how it broke meditation down into the following simple steps: 1. Sit in a comfortable position with eyes open. Relax the body. 2. Don't follow the past. 3. Don't anticipate the future. 4. Remain in the present moment. 5. Leave your mind alone. Before this, I had always meditated with my eyes closed. After reading this book, I now meditate with my eyes open. I find it's a good way to integrate the meditative state of mind with the rest of my daily activity. With the eyes open, there's less of a sense of the meditative state being something separate from the world. I'm also loving the Embodied Life teachings of Russell and Linda Delman. While they sometimes teach together, most of my learnings are from Russell Delman. He combines Zen with another of my pillars - Feldenkrais. Both are ways of developing awareness. Zen does it through stillness, while Feldenkrais does it through movement. Delman shows how powerful using both can be. The following online course was very powerful - https://www.feldenkraisaccess.com/living-embodied-life I can safely say that meditation will be the one practice I keep, even if the others change. In some ways, I was always meant to be a meditator. As a child, I learned how to detach myself from the external world in order to cope with pain and suffering. I had a traumatic wisdom tooth operation under general anaesthetic. Something went wrong, as I was paralyzed and couldn't speak, but I could still feel pain as the surgeon began working on my teeth. I remember visualising a spinning wheel and telling myself that the pain would stop if I could stop the wheel from spinning. Eventually I lost consciousness. I'm pretty sure this experience forced me to learn how to detach my mind from the content of its experience. On another occasion, I was walking around my school during recess when something flashed in my mind and the world around me became oddly unreal. I had the thought that everything was a simulation, and was amazed at the level of detail in everything. There was a sheer generosity in what had been created for me to experience. Throughout my life, I have been drawn to altered states of consciousness such as this. Meditation remains the simplest and most reliable way to experience this regularly. --- As part of my meditative practice, I would include the Lojong practice of mind training. --- Also Eugene Gendlin's Focusing --- Phenomenology is a form of meditation. Reading Sartre's La Nausea was probably my first experience of meditation. ---