Meditation For Manifestors

Building Your Own Perfect Practice

Click here to listen to the audio essay on Youtube.

Meditation is like flossing your teeth. Everyone knows they should be doing it (and doing it consistently), but when it comes time to visit the spiritual dentist, most of us are going to be left floundering. “Yeah, I meditate… sometimes.”

“Meditation,” though — however you choose to define it — is an invaluable tool on every spiritual journey, manifestation journeys included. By learning to meditate and meditating frequently, you’re familiarizing yourself with the workings of your unique mind. You’ll begin to decode the patterns of thinking and feeling that govern your life — and this will help you gain more control over which states you occupy on a day-to-day basis.

You should think of your meditation practice as the “strength and conditioning” portion of your general spiritual training. If I want to become an Olympic high jumper, it’s not enough to spend all my time drilling techniques and practicing actual jumps. I need to get in the weight room, too. I need to build the requisite strength to actually utilize all of my technical ability.

So, today, we’re going to discuss meditation — specifically as it relates to manifestation.

I’d like to begin by making a critical point.

A habit that is hard to keep is a habit that’s been poorly designed.

Here’s what that means: If I want to build some new habit but can’t stick to it, it’s probably not the case that I’m lazy or defective; it’s probably the case that my new habit costs too much time and attention as I’m currently approaching it.

Imagine I want to get in shape but have no athletic background. I decide that every day after work, I’m going to come home, change my clothes, pack my gym bag, drive to the gym, and work out for an hour.

After a week of doing this, I stop. And then I tell everyone, “I just can’t get in the habit of exercising. I guess I don’t have the willpower.”

But hold on a second. If I am not in the habit of exercising, think of what a burden it becomes to launch right into this new workout program with full force. I have to go from not exercising at all to coming home from work (when I am exhausted), spending half an hour changing and packing my gym bag, driving 15 minutes across town to the nearest gym, and then coming home and doing everything else I usually do, but with 2 hours less time in my day.

My habit is poorly designed — at least for a starter habit.

I’d be much better off coming home from work, changing, and walking around my neighborhood. That costs less time and organizational attention.

Or, even more optimally, instead of taking my lunch break at the fast food restaurant next to my office, I could take a ten-minute walk to a healthy spot nearby. If I do that, I’m killing two birds with one stone — I’m getting twenty minutes of walking in, and I’m changing to healthier eating habits. Most importantly of all, though, this habit is part of the natural flow of my current life. I am going to get lunch on my lunch break, so pairing my new habit with something I already do anyway makes me much more likely to stick to it.

You get the idea.

The number one reason why people can’t stick to their meditation practices is that they are asking too much of themselves too quickly.

You will not go from zero minutes to 45 minutes of meditation a day before bed when you’re exhausted. The same goes for morning meditation — nobody is going to sacrifice an extra 45 minutes of sleep (when they’re already chronically sleep-deprived) to get up and meditate.

So here is tip #1:

Start small and aim for consistency.

Start by meditating for three minutes once per day. Don’t put any pressure on yourself to meditate a certain way or with a certain goal in mind; just sit down, clear your head as much as you can, and sit for three minutes.

You’ll find that once you sit down to meditate for three minutes, you’ll be more inclined to meditate for 5 minutes. You won’t even have to plan it out — one day, you’ll just look up at the clock and realize five minutes have gone by. And tomorrow, when you’re really busy and stressed out, you’ll still be able to hit your three-minute minimum with no pressure.

From here, you can build. You can add a second three-minute session at the end of your day. Or, you can extend your session to 5, 8, or 10 minutes.

Our goal is simply to make our new habit easy to accomplish. We’re foolproofing it. Everyone can find three minutes a day to meditate. And three minutes is a short enough span that, even if you feel you “aren’t good at meditation,” you won’t feel stressed about the prospect of sitting down for a three-minute session. If you set your target at 30 minutes, though, even if you can stick to that today, tomorrow, and the next day, a point will come where you say, “I don’t have it in me today. I’ll just take the day off and save it for tomorrow.” And that’s what we don’t want: failures of consistency.

How To Actually Meditate

With all that about habits in mind, let’s get into the meat of the issue: how to actually meditate.

The basic explanation we’ve all likely heard before is, “Sit down and observe your thoughts. Don’t follow your thoughts down rabbit holes, but don’t bat them away either. Just let them come and go naturally.”

That’s all well and good. It’s simple enough to understand and to try and follow. But in not explaining the history and/or mystical “goals” of the meditative state, I think we lose some of the practice’s beauty.

At their core, “meditation” and “prayer” are synonymous and share the same goal. In Western contexts, the “goal” of prayer is to achieve a mystical “union” with God. In Eastern contexts, meditation's “goal” is to dissolve the ego or personal self. But again, these are actually the same goals, just expressed in different ways.

I like to think of the difference between meditation and prayer as being purely directional. Western prayer strives toward God, and once “union” is achieved, the personal self dissipates. Eastern meditation guides us away from the personal self and, thus, toward God. One process is positive, and the other is negative, but in either case, we arrive at the same place: a dissolution of the personal self and a direct connection with the divine.

I’m offering this background for two reasons. First, because, as previously noted, I think it highlights how special an experience meditation can be. It’s not simply a means of dealing with minor stresses — though it’ll help with that, too. When you pray or meditate, you are opening yourself up to truly divine and transcendent experiences. You are walking a sacred mystical path — even if your practice is only 3 minutes long to start. Those three minutes are special.

The second reason I mention all this is that, by understanding the historical backdrops of meditation and prayer, respectively, we can turn to the experts in both disciplines to see how they train young practitioners.

One v. Zero-Pointed Meditation

When I was young, I thought rosary beads were just something old ladies carried around with them so they’d have something to occupy their hands when they weren’t knitting. And in a lot of cases, that’s probably true. Unfortunately, the Catholic Church never teaches anyone the point of repetitious prayer. However, we can figure out the point for ourselves by looking at two other examples of repetitive religious practices: The Eastern Orthodox “Jesus Prayer” and transcendental meditation.

The Jesus Prayer is as follows: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have Mercy On Me, A Sinner.” It’s repeated over and over and over again. Transcendental meditation involves the repetition of a mantra (a sound, word, or phrase) over and over and over again as you meditate.

So, we have the repeated prayers of the rosary, the Jesus Prayer, and TM — what do they all have in common?

Repetition.

That should get you thinking. Though it’s often implied that the content being repeated is repeated because of its supreme importance, the fact that these three different approaches all share repetitiveness despite their differing content illuminates the fact that repetition itself is what’s valuable.

The point of all these methods is to direct 100 percent of the practitioner’s attention to something clear and discrete so as to minimize all other mental distractions. They’re all one-pointed meditations — you’re meant to focus your attention on one point.

Zero-pointed prayer or meditation is meant to focus the attention on no point — to achieve a state of pure being or union with God (which, again, is the same thing).

But zero-pointed meditation is hard. When your mind is full of thoughts, even if you’d really like to quiet it completely, that’s a tall task. And when most people sit down to meditate with the goal of “quieting the mind and observing thoughts,” that’s what they’re trying to practice — zero-pointed meditation.

One-pointed meditation was created precisely to make this process easier. Instead of telling practitioners, “Don’t think about anything,” teachers can tell them, '“Only think about this one thing, but think about it over and over again.” That second approach is much simpler. I don’t have to worry about clearing my head; I just have to repeat a prayer or mantra or phrase to myself.

The point of one-pointed meditation, too, is that it inevitably leads to zero-pointed meditation. Have you ever repeated a word to yourself over and over and over again to the point that it starts to sound funny and ceases to have any meaning? That’s the process of a one-pointed meditation turning into a zero-pointed meditation.

We begin in a normal state of mind that is focused on many different points of attention. We narrow our attention until it is encompassed completely by one single point. And then, eventually, that one point dissipates, and nothing remains.

Building Your Practice

Meditation practices fail when they ask too much of the practitioner (they’re poorly designed) and when they’re too advanced (they expect practitioners to dive right into zero-pointed meditation).

If you set a goal to sit down and “clear your mind” for fifteen minutes per day, it’s going to be really difficult. That’s a long time to flounder around trying not to think about anything.

Make life easy for yourself.

Start off small, and start off one-pointed. Pick a mantra/prayer/phrase and repeat it over and over again to yourself for 3 minutes. It doesn’t matter what the mantra or prayer is — just that it’s short and simple. Do this every day until it’s a habit. Then, work up in one or two-minute intervals or add a second session.

If you do this consistently, it will only take a few months to build your meditation muscle to a level where it’s able to handle 30-40 minute sessions of one-pointed practice. And as you get more and more comfortable here, you can start experimenting with zero-pointed practice.

Why This Matters For Manifestation

Manifestation is a process of consciously choosing which states of thought/feeling you persist in as you go about your life. If you can’t narrow your attention to one point for three minutes, then you won’t be able to live in an entirely new state of consciousness all day, every day.

When you master meditation, manifestation becomes easy.

As always, good luck.