The Vikid Meditation Guide

The plain idea

Meditation is training attention on purpose. You choose something to rest your attention on, such as the breath, a sound, a phrase or the sensations of the body; you notice when the mind wanders, as it always will; and you bring it back, without scolding. That is one repetition. Do it a few hundred times and you have meditated. The noticing and returning is the exercise, the way lifting the weight is the exercise at the gym.

Why it matters

Most of us spend our waking lives inside a stream of thought we never chose: planning, replaying, judging. A well-known Harvard study (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010) sampled thousands of people through a phone app and found their minds were wandering nearly half the time, and that people were less happy while their minds wandered. Meditation trains the opposite skill: being where you are.

The research picture, honestly stated: well-designed trials and meta-analyses show that mindfulness-based programmes have modest but real benefits for anxiety, depression (especially preventing relapse) and stress. Claims of dramatic brain changes and cures are often overstated, and a minority of people find intensive meditation unsettling. Like exercise, it is helpful, not magic.

The main families

Focused attention – resting on one object, like the breath (Buddhist samatha, many forms of yoga).
Open monitoring – noticing whatever arises, thoughts, sounds, sensations, without holding on (vipassana, mindfulness).
Loving-kindness – deliberately cultivating goodwill toward yourself and others (metta).
Mantra – repeating a word or sound (Transcendental Meditation, japa).
Self-inquiry – turning attention back on the question “who is aware?”, as in Advaita and the last question in my list below.
Body scan – moving attention slowly through the body, noticing tension and sensation.

An everyday analogy: training a puppy

Teaching a puppy to sit, you don’t shout every time it wanders off. You gently bring it back, again and again. The mind is the puppy. Getting angry at it for wandering just gives it something new to chase. The kindness of the return matters as much as the return.

A worked example: a ten-minute session

Sit comfortably, back upright but not rigid. Set a timer for 10 minutes.
Settle: take three slow breaths, longer out than in.
Anchor: let the breath return to normal and feel it at one place, the nostrils or the belly.
Count if it helps: one on the out-breath, up to ten, then start again.
Notice wandering: when you realise you are thinking about lunch, silently label it “thinking”, and return to the breath. Starting at one again is fine.
Close: for the last minute, widen attention to the whole body and the sounds in the room. Notice how you feel, without needing it to be special.

Do this daily for a month before judging it. The first weeks mostly reveal how busy the mind is, which is itself the first insight.

Building the habit

The hardest part of meditation is not the sitting, it is the showing up. A few things that reliably help: attach it to something you already do every day (after the morning coffee, before you open your phone); start small, five minutes done daily beats an hour done once; sit in the same place so the place itself becomes a cue; and keep a one-line log of each session, which turns vague intention into a visible streak. Guided recordings and apps are fine training wheels. Retreats and a teacher help once you want to go deeper. And when you miss a day, which you will, treat it exactly like a wandering thought: notice, don’t scold, come back.

Common misconceptions

“Meditation means emptying the mind.” Thoughts will come. The skill is not being dragged away by them.
“I’m bad at it because my mind wanders.” Each time you notice and return, you are doing it right.
“It’s religious.” It comes from religious traditions, especially Hindu and Buddhist ones, but secular forms are widely practised.
“It should always feel calm.” Sometimes it brings up restlessness or old feelings. That is normal; go gently and seek guidance if it becomes overwhelming.

How it connects

Spiritual, Advaita, The Yoga Sutras and Breathwork
Sen Ts’an: “never be for or against”.
Epicurus: peace of mind as the goal of life.

The truth revealed: you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to stop being knocked over by every one of them.

Below are my own notes and ideas for things to meditate on.

Notes

Colour
Vibration
Shapes
Emotions (Love, Compassion, hate, anger, etc…
Body Scanning
Breath
Qualities (Beauty, Confusion, Clarity, etc…)
Quite
Questions
Meditation during different postures
Virtual Reality Creation
God
Senses (Odour, Smell, Sight, Touch, Heat, etc…)
Awareness itself
Becoming Objects, Transformation
Time & Space
Motion (how is it possible?)
What is light speed, why is it a limit
What is world peace? What is personal peace?
Find tension in the body, is it physical, how does it correspond to mental?
What is wrong, right now?
Who or what is this ‘I’

Visualization Ideas

Color
Shape
Three dimensional shape
Rotation
Known person
Unknown person
Feelings
Body part
Discomfort
Breath