Meditation and contemplation are no longer practices existing on the sidelines of modern life. Many professional athletes consider their morning meditation as essential. The medical world acknowledges that meditation helps patients deal with chronic pain, stress, anxiety and depression (Mayo Clinic 2/10/24). A Wharton School of Business study in 2019 found that meditation can “reduce stress, improve focus, help regulate emotions, increase cooperation and team building, and lead to better decisions.” Most of us have already heard about this.
So why isn’t everyone doing it?
Because it takes time. It takes consistency. It takes discipline.
Meditation or mindfulness practice promises a mastery of ourselves that changes who we are. And no trumpets are blaring, no lights are flashing, no accolades are forthcoming, so we must see a point to ourselves that is our own reward.
Though many forms of meditation exist, today we will look at the first step in what Rudolf Steiner calls the six basic exercises. Many reasons exist for beginning a meditative practice. One reason is so that we can become masters of ourselves.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
In what follows, the conditions which must be the basis of any occult development are set forth. Let no one imagine that he can make progress by any measures applied to the outer or the inner life unless he fulfils these conditions. All exercises in meditation, concentration, or exercises of other kinds, are valueless, indeed in a certain respect actually harmful, if life is not regulated in accordance with these conditions. No forces can actually be imparted to a human being; all that can be done is to bring to development the forces already within him. They do not develop of their own accord because outer and inner hindrances obstruct them. The outer hindrances are lessened by means of the following rules of life; the inner hindrances by the special instructions concerning meditation, concentration, and the like.
The first condition is the cultivation of absolutely clear thinking. For this purpose, a person must rid himself of the will-o’-the-wisps of thought, even if only for a short time during the day – about five minutes (the longer, the better). He must become the ruler in his world of thought. He is not the ruler if external circumstances, occupation, some tradition or other, social relationships, even membership of a particular race, the daily round of life, certain activities and so forth, determine a thought and how he works it out. Therefore, during this brief time, acting entirely out of his own free will, he must empty the soul of the ordinary, everyday course of thoughts and by his own initiative place one single thought at the center of his soul.
The thought need not be a particularly striking or interesting one. Indeed, it will be all the better for what has to be attained in an occult respect if a thoroughly uninteresting and insignificant thought is chosen. Thinking is then impelled to act out of its own energy, which is the essential thing here, whereas an interesting thought carries the thinking along with it. It is better if this exercise in thought-control is undertaken with a pin rather than with Napoleon. The pupil says to himself: Now I start from this thought, and through my own inner initiative I associate with it everything that is pertinent to it. At the end of the period the thought should be just as colorful and living as it was at the beginning.
This exercise is repeated day by day for at least a month; a new thought may be taken every day, or the same thought may be adhered to for several days. At the end of the exercise an endeavor is made to become fully conscious of that inner feeling of firmness and security which will soon be noticed by paying subtler attention to one’s own soul; the exercise is then brought to a conclusion by focusing the thinking upon the head and the middle of the spine (brain and spinal cord), as if the feeling of security were being poured into this part of the body.
Excerpt from: Guidance in Esoteric Training, Chapter I: General Requirements: General demands which every spiritual aspirant for occult development must put to himself, by Rudolf Steiner.
Perhaps if this were easier to do, people would be less inclined to take medications to fall asleep, to calm down, to get work done. Many people don’t even try meditation or mindfulness before seeking external help. Why? Perhaps we don’t have faith that it will work. What we don’t have to take on faith is that there will be no damaging side effects.
If we give this exercise a try for just 5 minutes a day until the 15th of May, we will have spent 2 ½ hours in meditation over the course of a month. Of course, we can go meditate longer than 5 minutes if we want. Our minds will wander, extraneous thoughts will pull us off course, but we just keep coming back to the pin or the pencil or the paperclip or the button or whatever we decide to focus on. We do get better and better at this if we keep at it.
We are free to mediate or not, obviously; however, if we want to experience the spiritual world and our place within it, we cannot just wait for it to happen, we must begin the work.