A Beginner’s Guide To Meditation, Or How I Became A Meditation Guide In The First Place

For Mental Health Awareness Month, I will be sharing a step-by-step, easy onramp for beginner's interested in learning meditation.

If you are interested in exploring meditation to further your mental health journey, you can join me starting on May 1st - or you can take the journey on your own asynchronously.

Join me on Medium where I will be posting each day's update to the 14-Day guided meditation.

I'm confident that this course will make meditation easier and more attainable for you. It's built off of a system I've developed over the course of the last few years working with people who have never meditated before or have quit when they tried.

How It Happened

In 2020, I accidentally became a meditation teacher.

It wasn’t my intention, but it was something that had been asked of me. As we all remember well, the entire world was slipping into uncertainty in those early days of the pandemic in 2020. Each of us had to deal with the free fall into the unknown in isolation from each other. Not knowing where the bottom was, anxiety flourished in everyone. Mental health quickly moved from the background of culture to the forefront. How to deal with, well, reality became an imperative. For everyone.

As a people leader at Reddit, I had for years made it a point to block out time on my calendar every day for meditation. I had done it for my own accountability. It was me making a commitment to myself. Even missing my daily meditation was part of the practice because I would see the commitment on my calendar and be aware I was choosing not to honor it that day.

I was doing it for me, but being that I keep my calendar openly visible to anyone on my team or at the company, my commitment to my meditations started doing more. First, it outed me as a meditator. Second, it gave other people permission to make time to prioritize mental health for themselves.

So it was that when our collective moment of great anxiety came in 2020, I was asked to begin leading weekly meditation sessions for employees. It started as a small idea to fill time in those digital-only work from home days. Alongside Zoom happy hours and watch parties and games and dance parties we all tried to keep us feeling connected. The meditations, though, they stayed.

Those sessions continued for the next few years through 2023 (and going). Along the way, I also began weekly audio guided meditations and conversations with Reddit’s 1.5M members strong r/Meditation community.

Slowly, but assuredly, I had become a meditation teacher in many different forums both IRL and URL. It just kept unfolding. What does meditation mean in a work context? In a party context? I kept exploring.

In that exploration and unfolding, I began to find my teacher voice. I became a meditation teacher specializing in bringing people into their first ever experiences with meditation. I recognized right away that most people struggle with how daunting meditation can seem. It’s a big ask to quiet your mind!

So, I started to wonder…what if we didn’t ask that? What if instead of being told to run away from your thoughts, you were invited to pick them up and play with them?

With this prompt in mind, I began to develop a method of my own that fuses together different modalities I’ve learnt throughout my life from various teachers and completed it with the addition of my own insights gleaned from the experiences of my personal practice.

In this method, I discovered that oftentimes anxiety becomes creativity when you play with instead of run away — when you call it in, rather than cast it out.

How It Works

This meditation method, called ‘The Seven Directions’ is meant to achieve a few things:

• Be approachable to the modern mind by inviting you to engage with your inner thoughts rather than retreat from them
• Transform your relationship with anxiety by reframing it as creative energy
• Cultivate your creativity by empowering you to experience your inner world more deeply

At the core of the Seven Directions is the idea that the anxiety we often feel to be so overwhelming can be broken down into bite size chunks by segmenting your inner experience into different cognitive containers defined by specific questions. These questions, while specific, are designed to be open-ended so that the emotional energy of your inner experience can fill them however you need.

• What is in front of you?
• What is behind you?
• What do you receive?
• What do you give?
• What do you rest upon?
• What shines upon you?
• What is in your heart?

In consciously asking these questions and noticing what unconsciously arises in response, an internal dialogue emerges that helps make your vocabulary of your inner emotions more clear.

With that clarity, you might find yourself empowered with the opportunity to move your emotional energy with creative courage or to dissolve your emotional energy with mindful gratitude. Emotion is information. Spoken in the language understood by your heart.

Think of it like this: your breath happens both consciously and unconsciously. So do your thoughts. The Seven Directions meditation is a conversation between your conscious and unconscious self through mindful breath and mindful thought.

How To Begin

For Mental Health Awareness Month this May, I’ve built an on-ramp to meditation. It is a 14-Day Meditation Journey designed for beginners that leverages the Seven Directions method, which is also designed for beginners. So…if you are a beginner to meditation, this is very much made for you.

It starts with a one-minute meditation.

Super easy.

Then it adds one more minute to each following day, slowly becoming a bit more hard with every step. If you can make the commitment to meditate once a day for fourteen days, you will be amazed at the muscles you’ll have built in your mind.

Give it a try.

Starting May 1st and onward for the first fourteen days of May, I will be posting each step of the 14-Day Meditation Journey and following along myself. Consider following along with me. Consider putting it in your calendar to represent that commitment to yourself.

If you’d like to listen ahead, you can preview the whole journey below. Spoilers don’t matter. It’s not about suspense. It’s about diving in and developing your practice.

If you’d like to accept my invitation to join in, go ahead and listen to Meditation Day 1: Breath for an introduction to how this will work.