How To (Finally) Start Meditating

Practising mindfulness isn’t complicated, but it’s also not easy

- Clay Skipper

NEAR THE BEGINNING OF the pandemic, when we were all freaked out about surfaces, I started using my elbow to push the lift buttons in my apartment building. It’s more sanitary but less effective. In hitting eight (my floor), I’d often clumsily mash five (not my floor). In the 12 or so seconds it takes the lift to ascend five stories, I’d frequently end up so lost in either my thoughts or my phone that I’d get off on the wrong floor. You might say I’m not mindful.

It’s particularly embarrassing, then, to admit I’ve had a meditation practice for years – ever since I walked into a bookshop and, out of sheer curiosity, picked up The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh. (Mindfulness is a present, ongoing awareness of what’s happening. Meditation is the formal practice of mindfulness.) As well as giving basic instructions on how to meditate, it lays out a way of relating to thoughts, emotions and feelings that’s downright liberating to someone neurotic enough to push a left button with his elbow. According to Hanh, through the simple act of paying attention to my breath – and thus “keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality” – I could quiet my anxieties, lighten up, and “find joy and peace in this very moment”. That’d be a miracle indeed.