Learn to sit.
The five practices.

Most apps hand you a voice and not a map. So people can sit for years, get quite good at it, and still not be able to say what they are practicing or what comes next. Here is the map. It is smaller than you think.

THE SHORT VERSION

Sit down. Put your attention on your breath. When you notice it has wandered, bring it back. That is most of meditation, and it is enough for a long time.

Once you can stay with the breath for most of a sit, try sitting with nothing to hold and let things come and go. Restless? Count ten breaths. Sleepy? Open your eyes. Hard on yourself? Wish yourself well for a minute. You are not trying to get anywhere.

First principles

Before the practices, the ground they stand on. Jon Kabat-Zinn laid it out in a talk at Google in 2007. The same five are in the suttas, in Zen, and in the plain-English books, so each one below names a second place to find it.

You only have moments

The future is a concept. So is the past. Both are useful. "The only time in which our lives are unfolding is now." The Bhaddekaratta Sutta says it in fewer words: do not chase the past, do not place expectations on the future.

Awareness has no edge

"You can't put your finger on where your awareness stops." It can hold the breath, a sound, a thought, or all of them. Suzuki, in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: "The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless."

You have a body, and you are here

The senses are the only way you know the world. Sitting starts there, not in an idea about sitting. The oldest instruction there is, from the Satipatthana Sutta, begins with the body: sit down, hold the body erect, set mindfulness to the fore.

The breath runs without you, and you can take it over

If it depended on remembering, you would not have made it this far. It is also the one vital rhythm you can step into at will. Your heart will not slow because you ask it to. Your breath will. That is why nearly every tradition starts here. Gunaratana makes the same point in Mindfulness in Plain English: breathing is normally involuntary, yet a single act of will can slow it or speed it up. It is the door between what the body does and what you do.

Just for fun

Hold this moment in awareness "for no other reason than just for fun." Not to relax, not to improve, not to get anywhere. Zen says the same thing more sternly. Suzuki: "Just remain on your cushion without expecting anything." Dogen, in the Fukanzazengi: "Do not intend to make a Buddha, much less be attached to sitting still."

Everything below is a way of practicing those five.

Nearly everything is one of five

Strip the branding off most of what is sold as meditation and you find one of five practices underneath. They train different things, and knowing which one you are doing is most of what a beginner's course teaches.

Return to the breath

stability

Rest attention on the breath. Notice when it has left. Come back, without a fuss. Traditions call this concentration practice, samatha, or shamatha.

The default. Most people's first months to years, and it stays useful.

Just sit

clarity

No object. Let whatever comes come and go, and do not follow it. Zen calls this shikantaza. Researchers call it open monitoring. Silent sitting with no instructions is usually this.

Once staying with the breath is mostly true. It is hard to do well early, because there is nothing to hold.

Warmth

softness

Deliberately wish yourself well. Then someone you love. Then someone difficult. Known as metta, or loving-kindness. It undoes the harshness that pure concentration tends to breed.

Dry sits, harsh days. Its own sit, not a bolt-on.

Body

ease

Scan from the top down, or breathe into the belly, and let the body settle. Body scans, yoga nidra, and what gets sold as non-sleep deep rest all live here.

Agitated days, pain, and the first minutes of any sit.

Do nothing

rest

Drop even the effort to attend. Whatever happens, let it. Shinzen Young's name for it is the plainest.

Later. It is confusing early, and it looks identical to daydreaming from the outside.

These are not five separate skills. They are one lens, narrow at the breath and wide at just sitting. As Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it, "it's not about the breath. It's about the awareness." The breath is the way in, and it is where you come back to when you get lost.

The practices are old. The five-way split is ours. Insight practice, or vipassana, is not missing from the list. It is what the second practice becomes when you look closely enough to see experience arising and passing. Some schools add light labels, "thinking", "hearing", to keep the looking honest.

Watching the breath, or steering it

Because the breath is that door, there are two different things you can do with it. It helps to know which one you are doing.

Watching. You leave the breath alone and feel it. This is mindfulness of breathing, the first practice above. Kabat-Zinn's instruction is to feel it "without fiddling with the breathing at all."

Steering. You set the pace on purpose. Five and a half seconds in and five and a half out is a common one. This is breathwork. The yogic name is pranayama.

If you rest your attention on the breath while you pace it, you are doing both. The breathwork is the object and the attention is the practice. That is a legitimate way to sit, and plenty of people who think they are only meditating are doing exactly this. Slow breathing also has some of the better evidence behind it, which we go through on the science page.

One thing to know. A paced breath is easier to stay with, so it can flatter your sense of how steady your attention is. Every so often, let the breath go back to running itself and see what your attention does then.

Two rules you can actually use

Stability first

Until attention stays with the breath for most of a sit, that is the practice. Everything else is a supplement. Most people who have sat daily for a few years are still here, and that is not a failure. It is the work.

Every sit has the same shape

Settle for a few minutes: body, then breath. Do the practice. The bell ends it. Your level changes what the middle is, not the shape.

When it is not going well

The old manuals name two ways a sit goes wrong, and both have a fix you can apply in the moment.

Restless. Thoughts everywhere, body fidgeting. Go back to the breath, and count ten breaths. Start over from one when you lose count. Counting is a diagnostic, not a crutch: if you cannot reach ten, you know where you are.

Sleepy. Head dropping, breath shallow, time vanishing. Open your eyes. Sit up straighter. If that fails, stand and walk slowly for a minute and sit back down. And if you are simply short on sleep, sleep. Everybody nods off, including the old masters.

Harsh with yourself. Not a classical hindrance, but the most common modern one. A minute of warmth, aimed at you, before you carry on.

You are not trying to get anywhere

The traditions have a name for sitting in order to get better at something: a gaining idea. It is the most natural mistake there is, and it quietly turns a sit into one more thing to be good at.

Good sits and bad sits are weather. If you noticed you had wandered and came back, that was the whole practice, and it was complete. Over months you may find you notice a little sooner and come back a little more gently. That is not a score.

What a timer can see

The hard part of practicing alone is that nobody is watching. A teacher notices your breathing and your posture and asks what happened. At home you only have how it felt, and how it felt is weather.

quiettime can see your breath through the camera. Rate, how long you breathe out, whether it is belly or chest. Nothing is recorded and nothing leaves your phone.

Halfway through a sit, if your out-breath has got short, it says one line. Let each breath fall all the way out. If you are already breathing long, it stays quiet. Silence is the default, and a sitter who is settled hears nothing.

Watching is the hands-off side of the door. The halfway line asks you, once, to step through, let the out-breath go, and then leave it alone again.

The line is an invitation to let go, not a target to hit. There is no target. The one thing it ever asks for, a longer out-breath, has mixed evidence behind it, and the page on that says so.

It cannot see where your attention is, and it does not pretend to. It shows you what the body did. Naming what the mind did is still yours.

Further

Pick one line and stay on it for a year rather than sampling. In the order a systematic mind should read them:

After a year or two of daily sitting, a teacher or a retreat will move you further than any book or app. Including this one. A weekend is enough to start. Nothing on a phone substitutes for it.

What should I practice when I meditate?

Until your attention stays with the breath for most of a sit, return to the breath. Once that is mostly true, try just sitting with no object.

How do I know if I am meditating right?

If you noticed your attention had wandered and came back, you did it right. That noticing is the practice. There is no state you are supposed to reach on a given day, and it is not about making the mind blank. Wondering how the sit is going is just more thinking. Notice it and it goes.

Do I need a teacher?

Not to start. After a year or two, yes, or a retreat. They can see what you cannot see from inside your own practice.

I sat nearly every day for three years and did not know what I was doing →

Sit for five minutes →