As well as the meditations, you might use the following quick techniques at your work desk in your lunch or coffee break. These strategies are designed to assist in bringing your attention back to the present moment, the centre between past and future, and from there into the state of inner silence.

  • Look at the sky, the earth or nature. Nature is constantly in the present moment.
  • Close your eyes, bringing the attention inside. By briefly taking your attention away from things that might be disturbing your equilibrium you can re-establish your balance and then re-engage with the tasks.
  • Put your hand and your attention on your heart, or pay attention to your breathing for a minute or two. This again brings the attention back into the present moment.
  • Focus on the absolute present moment, using the thought experiment procedure described earlier.

You can’t do meditation, you can only be in meditation

Here are some useful things to understand that will assist in developing the experience of mental silence:

  1. You cannot do meditation, you can only experience it, so it’s important to disengage the often-habitual sense of personal effort humans often have. Rather than try to push yourself into the experience, you should just allow it to happen in its own time. Instead of ‘trying to make it happen’ it is better that you ‘desire the experience’ and make efforts to create an internal and external environment that is conducive to that experience
  2. It is useful to understand that it is not us who do meditation; rather, there is an energy of meditation within us, a latent mechanism or ability that simply needs to be awakened in order for us to experience it. So many of the strategies described here are better understood as ways of facilitating the action of that meditative energy rather than as ways of making us meditate.
  3. During meditation your general attitude should be directed at enjoying the experience and not getting too worked up if it doesn’t happen the first few times. Just allow the process to work out’ in its own time.