The Meditation Bible

Volume two of the Bible series

THE MEDITATION
BIBLE

Doctrine for the restless — compiled from ten thousand distracted sits
and the small stillness that eventually showed up anyway.

Try the breath pacer
The First Book

The Ten Commandments of Sitting Still

  1. I. Thou shalt lower the bar: two minutes counts, and the version of thee that showed up counts double.
  2. II. Same time, same seat — the habit lives in the furniture.
  3. III. Thou shalt not chase an empty mind; thou art here to notice the full one.
  4. IV. When the mind wanders, the rep is the return — not the staying.
  5. V. The itch may be scratched. This is meditation, not martyrdom.
  6. VI. Thou shalt not check the timer. The timer is fine. It has one job.
  7. VII. A guided voice is not cheating; training wheels build riders.
  8. VIII. Judge the practice by thy afternoons, not by the sit itself.
  9. IX. Missed a day? The streak thou keepest is called "returning."
  10. X. Tell no one at dinner parties, unless asked twice.
The Book of

Breath

1 The breath is the only anchor thou carriest everywhere, and it is always exactly where thou left it.

2 Box breathing is the doctrine of fours: breathe in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. Squares calm the animal.

Four rounds of box breathing, about a minute. Sit tall.

The Book of

The Monkey Mind

1 Thy mind will wander to lunch, to taxes, to an argument from 2019. This is not failure; this is what minds are for. Noticing the wandering — that is the practice.

2 Name the visitor and it loses its grip: planning, remembering, rehearsing. Labeled thoughts leave politely; fought thoughts move in.

3 Some sits are deep water and some are rush-hour traffic. Thou dost not choose which; thou only choosest to stay in the seat.

4 Boredom is not a problem to solve. Sit with it sixty seconds longer than comfortable and watch it turn into something else.

The Book of

Ten Minutes

1 Sit so the spine is tall and the everything else is soft. A chair is holy. A cushion is holy. The floor of an airport is holy.

2 Two minutes of fours to arrive. Then let the breath go free-range and simply watch it: in, out, the little pause between.

3 Each time the mind runs off — and it will, forty times, gloriously — return to the breath without commentary. Forty returns is forty reps.

4 When the timer sounds, take one slower breath, and re-enter the world slightly later than everyone else. That lag is the whole treasure.

Deep work is meditation with a keyboard — the executive practice lives at tenx.science. Volume one of this series travels: thetravel.bible.