Unless something comes along that makes it impractical, I sit in quiet meditation every morning (around 10am, if you were thinking of phoning).

I practise (now that’s a word that needs unbundling – I’ll come back to it sometime) what a Sōtō Zen Buddhist would recognise as shikantaza (just sitting), a distinctive form of zazen (seated meditation). In essence, I sit quietly and mindfully, with no particular aim. At best, I sit in simple open awareness of whatever arises (and if you sit and observe the passing dross of your immediate thoughts, you soon realise how busy your mind is) and at worst, I just focus on my in and out breaths to the point of counting them (up to 10 and then repeating). I’m not setting myself the task of contemplating any particular thing, or generating any particular feeling, and I’m certainly not blissed out or anything like that. Ordinary mind (another term to unbundle) is the way, and an ordinary mind turns out to be richly extraordinary, anyway.

I share a close affinity with the Zen mindset, but I am not affiliated with any established group led by a teacher or priest. Nor even an informal group, led by someone more like me – although my partner and I do sit together, day by day. Still, a household sangha (community) of two is better than a solitary practice. Apart from anything else, I live in a rural area well away from any Buddhist centre, and I’d have a 90-minute round trip in the car to get to any of them.

Meditating mindfully is at the heart of Buddhism. In the modern West, meditation has been hived off into an entirely secular activity, sold (like other commodities or services) by people of any faith or none, and often without an understanding of the connected framework that Buddhism has developed over 2,500 years. In that framework, meditation sits with seven other strands that make up an integrated eightfold path of practice that includes wisdom, ethics and mental discipline.

The secular answer is to promote (for money, generally) the benefits of mindfulness for stress reduction, relieving anxiety or just well-being. None of these benefits is news to Buddhist practitioners. But by neglecting the broader context, mindfulness risks becoming McMindfulness, devoid of its ethical foundations. The entry requirement for becoming a secular mindfulness teacher is simply the ability to pay for the training course. If I were looking for a meditation teacher, I’d want to know for how many decades they have practised: one would be a minimum, two or three would be much better.

Meditation, in the style of shikantaza, is very, very simple (simple, but not easy). But by already using several Japanese (and Pali) terms, I’m aware that I may inadvertently give the impression that Buddhist practice is somehow exotic and un-Western in outlook, making it difficult or inaccessible. It can be, and sometimes deliberately so. That is one reason why I’m not affiliated with any particular group, but for me, the use of such terms is just a shortcut. Once they are understood, they serve better than translations, which frequently require many more words, and ones which carry at least as much (but different) cultural baggage as the ‘originals’. But I just sit quietly in meditation every day. It’s not really very complicated, and anyone can do it.

In fact, it’s time for me to set out my zafu (you see how easily the vocab. slips in?) and to sit.

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One – Beginning Meditation

• Daily (1 Jan)
  • Sitting each morning, not chasing enlightenment — just watching the mind do what it does.
• Overwhelm (15 Jan)
  • Buddhism’s numbered lists can swamp a newcomer, but beneath the scaffolding is a simple, lived path you test in your own life.
• Exhale (29 Jan)
  • Trying to meditate for the first time: the fancy cushion, the loud timer, other distractions, the mind chattering away. You notice a breath, a thought, a letting go — and that noticing is the practice.
• Snakes & Ladders (11 Feb)
  • Early meditation feels like playing Snakes & Ladders: you count a few breaths, fall into daydreams, and start again. Noticing the distraction and returning is the practice — the falling off is the ladder.
• Calm (25 Feb)
  • After a couple of weeks of sitting, the breath settles, and thoughts lose their grip. Counting falls away, ease appears, and you begin to taste calm abiding — not as a technique, but as the mind quietly gathering itself.