I use Insight Timer. The daily streak feature helped me finally make it a habit, after half assing it for many years.
When starting it can be helpful to use guided meditations. There's a bunch in that app (mostly free), and on YouTube of course.
I like Shinzen Young's videos and audiobooks, he takes a very grounded, "technical" approach to this stuff.
My main "lessons learned":
- Do it every day, even if just a few minutes. Makes a huge difference.
- Make awareness broad. This takes practice, it's like a muscle. I made the mistake of making it narrow like a laser, which is much harder, less stable, and less useful! i.e. learn to hold 2, then 3 objects in mind "at the same time". e.g. the breath, and the birds outside, and the "sense of space" of the room.
The classic meditation object is the breath. In my case, that brought up a lot of emotional pain. It's fine to use other objects in that case (though eventually you can learn to integrate / heal the emotions too), e.g. focus on sounds or anything "grounding".
When starting it can be helpful to use guided meditations. There's a bunch in that app (mostly free), and on YouTube of course.
I like Shinzen Young's videos and audiobooks, he takes a very grounded, "technical" approach to this stuff.
My main "lessons learned":
- Do it every day, even if just a few minutes. Makes a huge difference.
- Make awareness broad. This takes practice, it's like a muscle. I made the mistake of making it narrow like a laser, which is much harder, less stable, and less useful! i.e. learn to hold 2, then 3 objects in mind "at the same time". e.g. the breath, and the birds outside, and the "sense of space" of the room.
The classic meditation object is the breath. In my case, that brought up a lot of emotional pain. It's fine to use other objects in that case (though eventually you can learn to integrate / heal the emotions too), e.g. focus on sounds or anything "grounding".