I have never known how to meditate in the way that is typically depicted in all kinds of media today. I am not able to sit down comfortably in some cross-legged position or alleged “easy pose,” listening to my breath and somehow clear my head. Not possible.
But there are other forms of meditation. Bruckner’s 8th Symphony in Celibidache’s rendering, clocking in at an hour and forty minutes, is a sublime experience of otherworldliness, so is watching Koyaanisqatsi and immersing yourself in it, or Visitors. But these may be strange tastes.
The easiest or best way is to just go out into nature. This does not have to be wilderness, but it has to be something that is out of your control, contains the unexpected, and requires you to just sit still and be mindful of your surroundings. David Attenborough is right – he typically is – about just being out there for 10 minutes in nature. Observe, marvel, and discover, like Thoreau famously said he did, and later philosophize like Emerson, maybe. Nature may be the big city, and you just sitting at an ideally open window, or in a park or near the street, watching the nature around you – people, pigeons, etc. Lose yourself in the now. Find not your own breathing, do not concentrate on yourself, but on your surroundings. Find the breath of the world, and discover your insignificance in it. This will do more to decenter yourself, to rethink your thoughts, and to – ideally – quite literally catch a fresh breath of air.
If you can be out in real nature, not our ghastly human-made habitats of concrete, steel and plastic (you can sense Emerson pushing me on here). Go out into the garden, maybe even the woods, the desert, the sea, or aim for the stars – and just be. Watch a bird fly, hear a fly buzz, when you don’t yet die, take in the smells and sounds and see that this all goes on without you, does not need you, does not require even your presence. You do not matter always. You are not all-important. You are just a guest, a visitor, and you have the freedom – as part of nature, even though we tend to deny that to ourselves – to also just be. Now that you are, what do you want to do with it? And so the healing, hopefully, can start.
Nothing fancy. All it needs is to be still for a moment, for at least 10 minutes, and to lose oneself in that which exists without us, in that which is always greater than us. The rest will follow.
Erratic Attempts 