You don’t have to meditate for a long period of time each day to experience the benefits. Just by doing meditation for 10-15 minutes each day you will be able to reduce feelings of stress and tension, cultivate positive states of mind, and overcome negative ones.

Sitting with your legs crossed in meditation is a traditional posture that helps to keep your mind focused during the meditation session. However, it is not necessary to sit cross-legged on the floor. You can do your meditation practice sitting in a chair if you prefer. The most important feature of the meditation posture is keep your back straight but not tense. Keeping your back straight will prevent your mind from becoming sluggish or sleepy.

No. We should always be focusing on something in meditation. This is called our object of meditation. We can prepare our mind for meditation by focusing on a neutral object such as the breath. Actual meditation involves focusing on, and familiarising our mind with, a positive object, for example love or compassion. By familiarising our mind with these objects inside meditation we will be able to keep a positive and happy mind outside of meditation. We will also notice over a period of time that our mind starts to change on a deeper level.

Because meditation is a training of the mind it is better to remove external distractions, such as music. This enables us to focus more clearly on our meditation object. Otherwise, music can just be another distraction in the meditation process.

Getting your mind completely still and distraction-free requires practice, patience, and familiarity. It is very common for distractions to arise in meditation. During the meditation session we can practice reducing mental busyness by returning our mind back to our main object of meditation whenever we notice it has become distracted. Outside of meditation we can train in reducing our daily distractions so that when we sit down to meditate we notice that our mind is naturally more calm and clear.