Meditation: Attaining to Awareness

There is almost no way to walk a spiritual path without integrating into your Practice a consistent practice of meditation in one way or another. Nearly every spiritual discipline in the world (and possibly every, I say "nearly" only because I have no way of having total awareness of every such system) utilizes meditation, albeit in many different forms, to either achieve awareness and attunement to the Divine in whatever form that is for them, or to engage in devotion or prayer. Many of these utilize meditation to both ends: growing their awareness of and ability to focus on the humming and workings of the Divine, and then applying this through focused devotional work. Meditation is ubiquitous also outside of spiritual systems: stoicism strongly encourages various meditation techniques, many people are trained to use meditation for various kinds of therapy, many more still use it because it feels good or because they feel it helps them perform better in their daily life.

While I'll be the last to ever recommend meditation as a "mind hack" or to increase "productivity", I do vehemently recommend meditation for those walking any sort of spiritual path. While I've been criticized for saying so, there is no way to do magick or any sort of deep spiritual work without a consistent meditation practice – and nearly anyone with experience or who is in the position of teacher, guide, or mentor will tell you this as well.

But perhaps the criticism comes from a misunderstanding of what it is I'm saying: after all, meditation, while ubiquitous, is not defined as being one singular set of actions, and therefore perhaps there is a misconception that meditation always looks like the kinds of contemplative meditation employed by Buddhists and the like. So let me start here.

What is Meditation?

Meditation refers to techniques which work towards the training of one's attention and awareness. Usually, these techniques seek to interrupt normal narrative or discursive thought. While techniques are highly variable, many – not all, some specifically rely on movement – encourage the training of one's ability to sit still. Additionally, all meditation relies on curating a specific kind of focus.

Occasionally, meditation techniques are broken up into the categories of concentrative and open monitoring[1], where the latter is purported to be a monitoring of physiological sensations or thought patterns rather than focus, but I would argue that all of this is concentrative and that we're splitting hairs by saying one is focused on concentration on a something and the other is focused on concentration on general events. The bottom line is that all techniques are related, in some way, to cultivating focus. I think this distinction is created more to differentiate spiritual contemplative meditation from so-called "mindfulness" practices that are generally less aimed at spiritual awareness and more rooted in material awareness. It is all meditation, however, and we can utilize different techniques in our daily Practice to different ends.

There are endless ways of meditating: there are seated meditations, there are standing or lying meditations, there are meditations that rely on the creation of vocal utterances and those which are silent. There are those which are devotional, those which are in motion and during the completion of a specific task, and those which are ecstatic. There are ways to meditate that can lend themselves to the experience of visions, ways which are meant to help the practitioner experience inner tranquility, some which aid in what we in the Western world call "mindfulness" and "emotional intelligence". What techniques you use will largely depend on what you are trying to accomplish, what makes sense for your level of capability and understanding, and possibly what your cultural context is. One thing I will say is that you should always start small, and be patient.

Why Should I Meditate?

As I stated above, meditation is a prerequisite to engaging with any spiritual path in a way beyond meeting one's basic psychological needs. For instance, a Christian can go to church and occasionally pray, and find themselves generally feeling more at ease due to having a framework for ordering a seemingly chaotic universe as well as a community within which to find support. Likewise, someone who calls themselves a witch or a pagan can read about the spiritual disciplines they are interested in and create a general system of cosmic order based on this, they can create an altar and add a few comforting or meaningful symbols, and they can engage with communities of people who do the same things and have interesting discussions, and the same basic psychological needs are met. However, this person can not be said to be relating to their God or Gods at the same level as someone who deeply engages in a consistent practice of curated focus. Only the latter person will be capable of legitimate devotional work, or any kind of magickal practice.

Meditation enables this kind of deeper connection through cultivating the skills required to access different regions of one's psyche as well as different information that is always present in our daily lives but which we may typically filter out, and the awareness of body that can eventually heighten our awareness of what are sometimes called extrasensory phenomena. There are more skills to cultivate, but let's start with these as they're primary: this is what you must learn to do before heading off to intensive consciousness alteration or astral travel. Meditation is an exercise – one would not expect to run a marathon without any training, it would be foolish. Similarly, it is not expected that we are all automatically capable of the deepest kinds of observation and listening, or of picking up on minute extrasensory phenomena that can contextualize our magickal workings or our relationship with the Divine. While some people do seem to be more sensitive to these aspects of spirituality generally, even they must hone their skills in order to direct them appropriately (and sometimes to navigate life in the material world, as occasionally excessive sensitivity can be painful when attempting to perform in the kind of society we live in).

It needs to be said that this isn't about creating any kind of social hierarchy of who deserves to practice whatever spirituality, or a kind of elitism around who really means it more. I'm sharing this information for free because I think there shouldn't be gate keeping around the most basic, prerequisite Practice required for us to truly connect with the Divine.

Beyond allowing you to truly engage with your spiritual practice and begin to attain to your purpose, disciplined and consistent meditation keeps us safe[3]. By cultivating the awareness of Self and of the forces around us, by cultivating our awareness of our own psychological boundaries and shadows, by cultivating the ability to sit still, to listen, to watch, to learn, we are able to avoid the pitfalls of running headlong into regions of being that we are not prepared for. Ceremonial magick, chaos magick, witchcraft, most types of pantheological worship, demonology, necromancy: all of these disciplines or specific elements of practice come with enormous risk particularly because they tend to be extremely detached from large communities of other practitioners who are doing exactly the same practice and who share a culture of support for one another, and because they tend to encourage the accessing of altered states of consciousness and communication with non-human beings without, usually, providing a specific set of prerequisite Practices for preparing oneself for doing so.

Getting Started

One of the primary misconceptions about meditation is that we are aiming to "empty our mind", to "shut off thinking", and this misconception is the primary thing, I think, that makes getting started with a meditation practice so daunting for most people. While this is partially true – as I stated earlier, we are seeking to exit a discursive or narrative mode of thinking usually – it isn't entirely true, and is often misrepresented. We don't learn meditation in a non-narrative state of thought. If shutting down the internal monologue, which is for most of us the primary way we interface with life, is the starting point, of course we will not go further, that's a ridiculous demand.

So here is where I recommend you start, if you've tried and failed to meditate before, or if this is your first time. Sit still for five minutes a day. Set a timer, and always finish after five minutes. Do this for several weeks. Do not take a day off, but do not expect anything else beyond this. Do nothing else but sit still for five minutes a day until it is no longer painful, but welcome. Then try ten minutes a day until that is no longer painful, then fifteen. When you're sitting, try to avoid positional adjustments. Keep your spine erect, and try to keep it erect the whole time, correcting your posture if you find yourself slouching. If you must scratch an itch or switch positions, that's okay at first, but try to just be still without giving yourself permission to fidget. If you have a kind of neurodivergence where this is especially painful or difficult, follow your own boundaries of course, but don't feel discouraged: you're welcome in this space, too, and it may just take going a little slower or making some minor modifications to the exercises. There are very few people for whom this will actually be impossible: remember, all you're doing is practicing sitting.

Once you're up to fifteen minutes a day, try working in a focal point. I recommend beginners start with a fourfold breath pattern: it creates the beginnings of good bodily awareness, is calming, and counting is a good focal point to return to when your mind drifts. The fourfold breath technique works like this: inhale to the count of four (1, 2, 3, 4), hold to the count of four, exhale to the count of four, and hold to the count of four. Try to do this for the whole fifteen minutes, but accept all of the moments where your mind drifts from the breath pattern. When you catch yourself drifting or breathing erratically again, or if you realize you've begun counting rapidly, pay attention to the speed of your heartbeat and begin the count again at that pace.

Do this for a few weeks or a few months until it becomes second nature, and until you find yourself feeling more and more focused on your breath. I recommend keeping a meditation journal, where you document the date, the time you meditated, perhaps your emotional state that day, and just take a few notes about how you felt while you were sitting. This is a great accountability buddy, but also a great way to work through some of the unexpected emotional reactions that may come up when you're learning to sit still. Many of the things we do every day are actively distracting us from the reality of our physical state, our emotional state, past trauma that may be unresolved, and so on, and all of these things can come up and be jarring. This is normal. It may be useful to reach out to an elder, spiritual community member, mentor, or therapist if you're feeling like what's coming up is difficult to navigate on your own. Meditation should not be outright triggering, and I don't recommend stopping[4], because ultimately the symptom of negative emotional states is indicating a deeper unresolved problem and it's positive that you're now encountering a level of self-awareness where this can be acknowledged and worked through rather than ignored.

What you may start to notice after doing a basic fourfold breath meditation daily for a few months is that you are finding it generally easier to emotionally regulate, or that you are generally more in touch with physical sensations. When I first started meditating daily I gleefully discovered that sex was much more enjoyable. Training your body and mind to sit still and focus have innumerable effects, some of which are unexpected. It can also be nice to come back to a fourfold breath in a relaxed position (lying or sitting with your spine straight) when you find yourself becoming overwhelmed, upset, or anxious in your daily life.

You may not "master" the fourfold breath in a few months, and that's okay. The hope is that after a few months you find yourself comfortably settling into the breath pattern and experiencing less and less narrative thoughts crossing your mind as you sit and as the stillness and the focus becomes more comfortable. At this point you are well on your way to beginning some more "advanced" meditation techniques that more specifically hone some of the spiritual skills we discussed earlier in this post. I'll share some of the deeper techniques I use daily in a later newsletter, but they are also available in many different places depending on what disciplines you're most interested in seeking out and learning from.

Thank you for reading, and I hope that this is helpful. As we continue our series on entheogens, I thought that it was important to share more in-depth information on the basics of dedicated spiritual practice, as I think that these techniques are extremely basic prerequisites to using entheogens in spiritual practice and hoping for any kind of positive result. It also felt extremely necessary given current personal events, and given that there is an increasing number of young people following me online who are engaged in kinds of spiritual activity that I think could be harmful if not rooted in disciplined practice, it would be irresponsible of me to not at least try to disseminate this information and some practical advice for getting started.

Please reach out to me if you have questions, my email is always open. I look forward to releasing my post on Kava later this month.

Notes:

See a few general definitions of meditation and these distinctions on Wikipedia, and click through to sources for more information.
For more in-depth explanation as to why I include "knowledge of the self" in this section, see my article on the magickal maxim "Know Thyself".
I don't care to share much information publicly, but we are in the midst of a harrowing experience with a friend who refused this kind of disciplined Practice and is paying dearly for it psychologically and physically. I have always, but now more than ever, am urging young practitioners of any flavor of witchcraft or magick, or any devotional practice, even if you believe it to be benign, to begin to curate psychological and psychic boundaries through real, in-person social connections who can keep you grounded and through disciplined meditation and other practices.
You know yourself. Nothing I write in this newsletter should be taken as psychological, psychiatrical, or medical advice. I have never heard of meditation in the forms that I am recommending it becoming harmful, but if for some reason it becomes harmful in your individual situation, stop and seek assistance from your community or a professional.