Picking the right location can help set our meditation practice up for success.
For meditating at home, it is helpful to find a corner or space in your home that feels relatively easy to relax into. As much as possible, we want to find and make use of a location that feels settled, calm, peaceful, neat, orderly, and clean. It can be helpful to choose a location that is relatively secluded and out of the flow of traffic, where we won’t feel on display to any others in the house.
Since sound can be distracting – especially words/talking and music that might suck our mind in – if possible we of course want our meditation spot to be relatively quiet. If you are someone who sometimes meditates with eyes open, we also want minimal distractions or eye-catchers in our line of sight, for example, nothing that will bring up emotions for us like a pile of unfinished laundry. Plain carpet or plain white walls can make a great visual, as can inspiring or relaxing decorations, like a religious image, an altar with flowers, and things that are meaningful or pleasant to us.
Once we find a spot that feels good, we want to then regularly use that spot to do our sitting. If our home is large enough, it can be helpful to use that place just for meditation (also perhaps also ancillary activities like reading inspirational texts, praying, journaling, and the like). Repeated meditation in one spot will probably eventually train our subconsciousness to make a psychological association of the place with tranquility, spaciousness, and clarity. This in turn can help us to meditate more regularly and to drop into deep meditation states more easily.
And while steady meditation in the same standard constant spot is a great ideal to aim for, it is also helpful for us to sit meditation wherever (and whenever) we have the opportunity. We can drop into our meditation anywhere – in a city park or out in nature, in a hotel, waiting in a dentist’s office or in a busy airport, or while riding a bus or train. Many office buildings have small privacy rooms where one can close a door.
As people undertake spring cleaning, I invite you to give an eye to your meditation space. In general, it can be helpful to experiment around our home until we find a place that feels comfortable to us and that we feel is conducive to our meditation practice. Setting it up for comfortable practice may help inspire a regular meditation habit, which we can in turn take with us to other settings.
