Welcome to Stillside’s series articles that we’re calling Meditation 101. These will be a basic guide for beginners. You might be brand new to the very idea of meditation, or maybe you’ve tried it a couple times but haven’t yet achieved a regular practice that feels right for you. Or maybe you’re a meditation and mindfulness veteran and just want to revisit the fundamentals. In any case, this series of articles will be a guide to meditating, from the Stillside perspective. There are dozens if not hundreds of ways to practice meditation, and just as many ways to organize that practice around your existing lifestyle. We will focus on just a few of these, especially mindfulness-based practices, which we believe to be the most effective and well-researched. But just know at the outset that, if you want to dive deeper and explore other types of meditation, there are excellent resources out there, and we will mention a few later on. But first, let’s start with some basic definitions.

What is Mindfulness Meditation?

What do we mean when we use the word meditation? For our purposes here at Stillside, we are going to be very specific. We aren’t talking about your state of mind generally, anything religious/spiritual, or the broader range of practices like yoga, meditative-esque athletic activities, tantra, etc. Our definition of meditation is the specific act of sitting, being physically still, and executing various mindfulness techniques in order to train the mind to be calm. That’s it. So, what’s mindfulness, and what are the techniques we’re talking about? Mindfulness means observing your own thoughts in one way or another. It means paying attention to what thoughts your brain is producing, without judgment and without chasing those thoughts. There are many ways to do this, and many variations on that simple concept. At its most basic, mindfulness is simply observing what thoughts enter your mind, and allowing them to pass without following them. Or it can be more complicated, involving intentional observation of your senses, or emotions, etc. If this sounds a little complicated at first, don’t worry. We are going to break it all down into very simple steps later. But as we discuss mindfulness and/or meditation, now you have an idea of what specifically we are talking about.

So, if you’ve heard meditation discussed in other terms, or about how various aspects of your life can be done in a mindful way, just know that those are somewhat outside the scope of these articles and Stillside generally. Or at best, they are adjacent to our scope. For our purposes we’re only talking about the deliberate practice of being physically still, ceasing any other activities, and training the mind to be calm through the various practices we will teach you. And this is a completely secular, non-religious activity. Although meditation can come to have spiritual significance for those who practice it, we will make no mention of spirituality, religion, or the divine.

To put it simply, meditation is brain-conditioning. Your brain is a thought-producing machine. At all times, it is processing information and stimuli, and synthesizing them into thoughts and emotions. It vacuums all available input, and spits out thoughts and emotions. For many people, that output can be overwhelming. We find ourselves ruminating, running the same thoughts over and over in our head, and feeling the emotions that come along with it. This can be tiring, or even agonizing. And as the available stimuli of our modern world increases with more content, more interconnection, and more media, there’s more raw material for our brains to chew up spit out. Our “always-on” lives can give our brains too much fuel for the fire. Meditation helps us slow down. Meditation trains you regain control over which thoughts to follow, and which thoughts to let pass by. Instead of being buried by a wave of thoughts and then swept away by their constant flow, you learn to navigate that flow, riding it like a surfer atop a wave.

And as mentioned, we are going to focus on Mindfulness techniques. There are other big categories of meditation such as: Transcendental Meditation (TM), which involves repeating a secret mantra word over and over, or Loving Kindness Meditation, which is akin to a prayer directing well-wishes towards others. Those types won’t really be the focus of our articles, but if they interest you there are lots of great resources out there. They tend to have similar results of training your mind to slow down, but they get there by different routes. The reason we like to talk about Mindfulness techniques is that they have a whole lot of great research directed at what they do to the brain, and how they can benefit their practitioners. And you can read all the research you like, but it all points to a pretty clear conclusion: engaging in a regular mindfulness meditation practice every single day can physically change your brain, and can have a litany of significant and measurable benefits on a wide variety of health conditions. It’s free, has no side effects, and is profoundly beneficial. Let’s dig deeper.

Benefits of Meditation

Meditation reduces the symptoms of depression and other mental health conditions, decreases stress, improves sleep, improves the quality of interpersonal relationships, is completely free, and has no side-effects. It sounds too good to be true, yet these claims are backed up by a lot of great research. See the additional reading materials at the bottom of this page if you want to delve into the weeds on all of that. But the research is there, it is plentiful, and it almost uniformly points in the same direction. And the best news of all – you don’t have to be “good” at meditation to enjoy its benefits. You don’t have to believe or “have faith” in meditation for it to work. You just have to do it. Just set aside a little time each and every day, and your life will change. In this way, it’s a bit like weightlifting. You don’t have to “have faith” that lifting the weights will make you stronger, you just have to lift the weights. Same with meditation. All you need to do is set aside 10-20 minutes each and every day, and follow the directions. Keep it up for just a couple of months, and your brain will actually undergo a physical transformation.

Here at Stillside, we think that meditation is life-changing and potentially life-saving. We want to share it with everyone we can. Yet, we found that many, many people abandon a meditation practice before it even gets started, simply because they can’t get comfortable and then get frustrated. They end up fidgeting, wondering when it will be over, and give up. That’s why we developed our furniture. We want to make meditation easier to do, and easier to keep up, so that more people would experience all the amazing benefits that it has to offer.

Upcoming Articles

In the articles that follow, we will go over a few of our favorite mindfulness techniques, beginning with Basic Mindfulness, and continuing on with more advanced meditations. We have guided meditations to go along with each technique, to help you get started. All of the information we write, and all the guided meditations we publish are totally free, forever, and can be accessed at any place and any time. You can also meditate on your own; guided meditations are not required.

But before we get to the guided meditations, we have developed an outline of how to set up your own meditation practice. Every element is important, from the time of day when you meditate, to the environment around you, to the chair or sofa where you actually sit to meditate. And to preview that last subject, we want to be clear that you can sit on any chair that works for you, but we developed the Om Chair to be the ideal meditation chair, and it is in fact the only chair in the world of its kind. What’s special about the Om Chair is that it’s the first chair ever built that’s deep enough to accommodate a cross-legged sitting posture, as well as the first chair whose ergonomic curved geometry actually supports that posture for long-term comfort. In short, it is the world’s first true meditation chair. When you sit on the Om Chair, you’ll find that you’re comfortable right away, without having to fuss or fidget. It puts you in the perfect position, then gets out of the way so you can focus your mind. And that might be the perfect segue way into our next article, which is all about setting up your own meditation practice.