I’ve posted some guided meditations. They are full of…ideas. Mindfulness as it’s been presented to me really isn’t about ideas so much as experiencing the mind when you’re trying to not have ideas. Based on my limited research, there are a lot of flavors of meditation and mindfulness, so I’ll try not to get too locked into a singular idea when I say that these meditations are kinda…thinky. 

Is this meditation? Is this mindfulness? There are a lot of people I respect in the meditation world who would say absolutely not. This is not focusing on the breath. This is not observing the activity of your thoughts, this is deliberately thinking specific thoughts. This is not emptying the mind. All of this is true. There is no substitute for an authentic mindfulness practice – the concentration you strengthen by focusing on the breath. The self-knowledge you gain from observing the contents of your mind and its thoughts. The peace you can experience by focusing on only the present moment, no future, no past, just now. I have seen my concentration strengthened by meditation and mindfulness practice, and it’s essential. Also essential is learning to pay attention to the freight train or the clown car that is the mind. The cascading thoughts that can range from mere goofy distractions to a truly life-threatening horrorshow. The instant relief and joy that can come from simply dropping out of the madness and into the simplicity of the breath. 

The ability to develop a practice of mindfulness meditation yields a lifetime of benefits that are well worth developing – required, even. There are lots of really good resources to get you into this practice (I’d recommend Sam Harris, Sharon Salzberg, Jeff Warren, Chade Meng Tan, Mindful Life – there are too many to name). I would recommend that anyone who wants a better relationship with their own mind and their own thoughts should do lots of straightforward mindfulness meditation practice, and building that muscle is more mission-critical than following the goofy and not-at-all scientific suggestions I’ve laid out here. You’ll be better at the meditations I’m offering if you’ve got some mindfulness game. 

I think that any trained and practiced meditator will tell you, what I’m proposing here is not mindfulness. 

But is there space in the wide world of meditation for a practice that cultivates gratitude, wonder, spirituality, appreciation, and joy? My hope is that, through a practice like whatever this is, we can see our capacity for openness and awestruck reverence grow, so that even in our darkest moments, we can drop into a kind of joy like we drop into noticing the breath, all at once, and wonder how we missed it before. 

It’s not quite mindfulness. It’s certainly not Buddhism. But it’s a spiritual practice.