***How To Meditate

"How to Meditate"

In 1970, I saw this title on a small ad in the back of a comic book.

I could learn to meditate for just $1, the ad promised. “Secrets of ancient yogi masters revealed: achieve psychic powers, control the mind!” Learning to meditate like a monk through this step-by-step course was only four quarters away. I could hardly wait.

Unfortunately, a dollar was a lot of money to me when I was eight years old, even if the psychic powers I gained learning how to meditate could be used to distract Jimmy Audia, who regularly pelted me with snowballs until I escaped into the sanctuary of my house.

So I got to work polishing Dad's shoes. He paid me ten cents per pair. I think he may have noticed that the same pairs got polished repeatedly, but nonetheless, he paid me for each pair I polished. After a couple of weeks, I’d earned enough to send in my dollar for the “How to Meditate” course.

This course turned out to be no different than other things advertised in the back of a comic book, in that the actual product was nowhere near as good as the ad (or what I had imagined after reading the ad). That's what I thought at first, anyway.

All it contained was two Xeroxed pages with these instructions:

Sit on the floor or in a chair with your back straight and your eyes closed in a quiet space at home. Focus on your breathing. Watch your in-breath and your out-breath. Mentally, say the word, "in," as you breathe in, and "out," as you breathe out. Each day, do this practice for twenty minutes and very soon, you will be able to control your mind, discover the secrets of the ancient meditation masters, and experience psychic phenomenon.

As with many things I bought after reading about them in comic books, I put this aside. It seemed like too much work a kid my age.

The funny thing is, when I started serious meditation study a few years later with a 70-year old Indian teacher, he gave me a practice that had almost exactly these same instructions. With meditation being so popular now, you can find these instructions in your local bookstore in many different how to meditate books. If you take a meditation retreat, you are likely to be given meditation instruction very similar to these as well.

Of course, I am not saying this is the only or even the best method of meditation. Personally, I think twenty minutes every day for weeks and months and years is far too long to wait to see results.

Since I’m an efficiency geek, I created some very simple meditation practices that offer powerful effects in an incredibly short period of time. I’ll save that story for another time. But until then, you now have everything you need to know to meditate… and maybe even develop those paranormal abilities. I never did develop any special mental powers myself, but in high school, after Jimmy and I both ended up on the gymnastics team, we became best friends.