A friend said that it drove him crazy to be told to "follow your breath" when meditating. You know, I tried following my breath but it keeps losing me in the crowd.
There is a tradition in some places to distinguish between meditation and concentration. If you have a religiously important picture or object or quotation, you might try to increase the depth of your activity by spending some minutes looking at and thinking about that item, considering and reconsidering its meaning and significance to you and to your life now. But if you are trying to train yourself for increased mindfulness, you want to pay attention to some more or less neutral thing. The idea is to try and be alert to times when your attention shifts off that anchor. Typical anchors are a point somewhere in the area you can see in front of you, or your breath. With such basic meditation, you are trying to be aware when you begin looking or thinking about something, anything besides your agreed-upon anchor.
Typically, it is quite possible to begin thinking about your mother-in-law or your taxes or the irritating little cut that will just never heal. As soon as you realize that your anchor - the point in your field of vision, or your breath is not the thing you are currently concentrating on, gently, without anger or upset, just realize you have slipped off the anchor and return to it. Personally, I find that a visual anchor works better for me but one thing about concentrating on my breath is that I can close my eyes for rest and not get off my anchor. However, I am quite capable of steadily looking at a point while thinking of my mother-in-law.
Finding that one's mind won't stay on the anchor and concluding that one is not suited to practice mindfulness meditation is the most common reason people abandon this valuable practice. It only takes 10 minutes a day and it doesn't cost anything but many people think they are somehow incapable or unsuited for the practice. All minds drift and wander. They are built for that as our eyes are built to blink. The golden moment, the instant of greatest value is that instant when you realize you are thinking and not attending to the anchor.
I find it charming, amazing and basically comfortable and comforting to let my breath occur on its own and feel my body's ability to quietly draw in a breath when it needs to. However, I can be lulled to sleep attending to my breath but much less often when using a visual anchor. Ten minutes can seem very long and agonizing so you may want to try just 5 minutes. A real timer that will alert you when the time is up is a big help. But even two minutes can seem very long when you try to pay attention to one point for that long.
