A library’s worth of books have been written with the intent of teaching you the in's and out's of meditation. Indeed, I wrote one myself! I can’t begin to reach that level of depth within the context of this article.

What I CAN do is get you started. I can give you the tools which will allow you to go and get your feet wet. Which is probably all you wanted anyway!

(Just in case you're wondering WHY you should learn how to meditate, click here.)

If you are interested in going deeper, I highly recommend seeking out a suitable instructor. They are few and far between, but they are out there. That being said, let’s get started …

First of all, what is meditation? This is another topic on which a tremendous amount has been written (are you beginning to notice a pattern yet?), much of it irrelevant to our main goal – extreme stress management.

For the purposes of this article, let us define meditation as:

“The Practice of Quieting the Mind”

This is not the same thing as going to sleep!

We want to quiet the mind, to achieve stillness, but at the same time maintain the conscious awareness that we lose during sleep. This is what learning how to meditate is all about.

This may sound like a simple idea, but putting it into practice can be a lot harder than it sounds. Remember … meditation is a skill.

The first thing that we have to do in order to explore how to meditate is find a relatively quiet place. Our mind tends to respond to stimulus from the world around us, so we need to cut down that stimulus as much as possible.

Another one of the great barriers to success in meditation is the body. In order to learn how to meditate, to quiet our mind, we have to learn how to quiet our body.

In order to quiet our body, we have to learn how to keep still. Most people find that this is easiest to do either sitting down or lying down.

Do you need to cross your legs and contort yourself into one of the postures you’ve seen in the yoga books? Not unless you want to guarantee your own failure! Leave the exotic postures to the Yoga instructors and pick a posture that’s comfortable for YOU.

So now we have you, lying down or seated in a comfortable position, in a nice quiet place with no one to disturb you. Now what?

Through a great deal of trial and error over hundreds of years, many people much smarter and more experienced than I have tried to teach others how to meditate. They determined that the easiest way to begin learning to quiet the mind is to first have you concentrate on a single thing, to the exclusion of all others.

What should you focus your concentration on? Different schools of meditation concentrate on different things for different reasons.

Taoists often concentrate on different "secret" places on the body, while Hindu yogis will concentrate on their subtle energy centers or “chakras”. Christian practitioners often concentrate on a single Bible verse. Tibetan Buddhists might teach you to concentrate on your breath, while Zen Buddhists might tell you to concentrate on nothing at all!

In order to help you get started, I’m going to suggest that you try focusing on …

… your nose.

You heard me right, your nose! It’s actually a common point of concentration in different traditions of meditation, primarily because it is the place that air flows into and out of your body.

So to recap, this is what you’re going to do:

1 – find a quiet place
2 – sit or lie down in a comfortable position
3 – close your eyes
4 – concentrate on your nose
5 – don’t think about anything else

You will very quickly learn that all of this is quite a bit more difficult that it first appears.

At first you will think to yourself, “this isn’t so bad … this is easy!” But as the minutes tick by, you will begin to fidget. There will be an itch that you feel a terrible need to scratch. You will realize how uncomfortable your position is and want to move just a little to “fix” it.

You will find your mind doesn’t stay put on your nose. You begin to daydream … sometimes for a very long time before you even realize that you’re no long paying attention to your nose!

Whatever you do, don’t strain. RELAX. Let it happen. It’s not going to help you manage your stress if you grit your teeth and clench your fists while trying learn how to meditate.

Just keep bring your attention gently back to your nose. Feel the gentle rhythm of your breath entering and leaving your nostrils as you inhale and exhale. Tune out everything else.

Set yourself an alarm clock and start with sessions 10 or 15 minutes long. In the beginning, your attention will wander countless times in the space of those few minutes.

But eventually, your concentration will become more stable. Your lapses of focus will become more infrequent. You will begin to truly, genuinely learn how to meditate.

It is hard to overstate the stress management benefits of regular meditation practice. Genuine meditation cuts right through to the source of the connection between the body and mind, the same connection that allows stress to effect us in such a physical way.

Remember, meditation is a skill. The more you practice, the better you will get at it, and the more it will help you.

So what are you waiting for? Break out that stop watch and get started! Commit to trying the practice daily for two weeks. That’s just 10 minutes a day for 14 days.

I promise, at the end of those 2 weeks, not only will you have a much better idea of how to meditate ... you will thank me!

When you're ready to really dive into meditation, you'll want to pick up your own copy of my course THE STRESS VACCINE™. It will get you up and running faster than anything else out there, and will help dispel many of the misconceptions which surround this very valuable practice.

How Meditation Benefits Stress

Looking for Free Guided Meditation Downloads for Stress?
The Psychological Effects of Stress

More HARDCORE STRESS MANAGEMENT™ Articles