While in my final semester of college in Baltimore, I learned how to meditate. My girlfriend and I arranged for a fifty-ish man from a local Buddhist center to give us an introductory lesson at her apartment for twenty dollars. When we answered the door and he saw two students who could've been his children, his face registered surprise. There was nothing trendy about meditation in 1987. "Mindfulness" was not a term used by anyone I knew.
He taught us vipassana, also known as insight meditation. The technique is simple to explain, but there's nothing easy about it. We sat cross-legged with our hands near our knees, and we just breathed. He told us to focus on the exhale breath, and just let the inhale happen naturally. He said that our minds would wander, and that was okay. If our attention drifted away from the breath, he suggested that we tag those distracted thoughts as "thinking" and resume focus. He stressed the importance of not trying to suppress or control these thoughts—he described them as clouds passing through the sky, neither good nor bad. Just thoughts.
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