A Sceptic’s Guide to Meditation
How I made it a habit after twenty years of failing
Meditation can be difficult, and I had many false starts with it. This is the story of how I made meditation part of my life.
I’ll explain how I overcame challenges, the enormous benefits I’ve gained along the way, and my thoughts on various approaches and techniques.
It’s the no nonsense guide I wish I’d had when I first attempted meditation over twenty years ago.
What is Meditation, and Why Bother?
It’s a familiar, tiresome premise: we live in a noisy world, with a million things tugging at our attention: work, meetings, social engagements, smartphones, email, ads, video calls, social media.
We didn’t evolve for this: we’re hunter-gatherers who’ve spent most of our 200,000 year history living a simple nomadic existence off the land.
So our design is out of date. We’re ancient beings, struggling to keep up with the multi-lane traffic of modern life. In a way, we are strangers in a strange land. And the human mind, left to its own devices, is pulled all over the place by external influences and inner thoughts, like a flame in a breeze.
