Average read time; 5 minutes

Face it, in this day in age, we all have a smartphone. It is blasphemous to not have one – if you don’t you will get some of the weirdest glances from the people you’ll meet in public. Our world can now fit into the small little screen we carry around in our pockets. Smartphones have their place in the world; communication is at an amazing peak in human history. I bring up smartphones today, not to speak ill of them, or to speak highly of them. I bring them up merely to use them as an example.

For the past three years of my life I have been learning and practicing meditation. A small slice of a lifetime, compared to some of the masters, but enough time to fully grasp the changes it has made on my life. I first started to be interested in meditation when I was watching Avatar the Last Airbender when I was ten years old. The idea of mindfulness floated around in my head for the majority of middle school, and all of high school. It wasn’t until I was in college that I felt comfortable enough to actually practice it, though.

This change came when I was bored in my dorm reading about the edo period of Japan (You have to love those samurais) three years ago. I stumbled across many quotes and anecdotes about the Buddhist religion. Many of the ideas that were being relayed to me resonated in my head. The ideas of mindfulness and self awareness. Wikipedia hopping quickly brought me to Zen Buddhism, which is a branch of buddhism dedicated to the idea of ‘Zen’. Zen is the idea of observing the mind and having a full control over your thoughts and feelings. From Zen I hopped to Zazen, which means seated meditation. This is just a more strict discipline of meditation.

Some of the philosophies found in Zazen become incredibly helpful for a routinely meditative practice. The physical act of seating, is something that can be lost, if you so wish. I prefer it because I am more traditional, but many people who practice meditation in this modern age skip it. Despite how it is stereotyped, meditation is not strictly sitting crosslegged rhythmically saying “ommmm”.

Meditation can be practiced anywhere and at any time. I know people who practice meditation in their offices, or during a fifteen minute break at lunch. This reinforces the idea of the more modern meditation; all you have to do is close your eyes and breathe, wherever you happen to be. Meditation is something you can do while carrying out a conversation with someone. It is just the idea of momentary existence. Or perhaps while you are trying to fall asleep just focus your breathing and hone in on your thoughts. Never say it is a bad time to meditate.

It might help to explain a little about what a meditation session actually involves now. Contrary to popular belief meditating is not clearing your mind. Clearing your mind is impossible. Meditating is about observing your thoughts without interference. The idea is to let them flow naturally, but not to get hung up on them. My favorite way to explain this to my generation, the millennials, is with your smartphone.

Think of your mind like your smartphone. When you have several apps running at once what does it do? It kills your phone faster. The solution to this is to routinely close your apps so they don’t run down your battery life. Many of my friends do this religiously, even when only a few apps are open. If your mind is a smartphone, then your thoughts are apps. Meditation is the process of clearing your apps. When you clear your apps on your phone they are not deleted off the phone, they just stop running. This is how it should be with your thoughts. They should not suddenly disappear as you might think, but however dismissed and moved onto the next, and then the next.

I love this metaphor because it is a clear way to show the effect that meditation could have on your mind by comparing it to a piece of hardware. Giving your mind the break of meditation you will have more energy throughout the day; you will have greatly improved your own battery life. This is only the surface of meditation.

If you want to check out more beginner information some places to check out would be Reddit.com/r/meditation, or take the free trial from Headspace. I have only tried out the first ten days and then I went on to practice on my own. It is a great free start on reclaiming your mind, check it out. Remember, just rest your eyes and clear those apps, one at a time.