Six phase meditation and reconditioning

I've tried meditation. And I hope one day I can do it. Evidence of the benefits is pretty clear. But there's a bootstrapping problem. If my mind was calm enough for me to meditate, I would meditate. But it's not. Meditation could calm me enough, but my mind is not calm enough. And so on.

Yesterday I came across a YouTube talk about a helpful mind hack: 6 phase meditation. It seemed to fit with my "reconditioning" theme, so I'm experimenting with it.

Here's the original talk.

If you are going to listen to it, I recommend listening to the first part at high speed (click to go to YouTube on a desktop, then use the settings button to speed it up) and the rest at normal speed.

Vishen Lakhiani, the guy who gives the talk, starts with six basic human needs and from them derives six parts for a daily meditation:

1. Compassion
2. Gratitude
3. Forgiveness
4. Future vision
5. Perfect day
6. Blessing

You take ten minutes and spend a minute or two on each part.

You can also try an abbreviated version, without the explanation of underlying theory, here:


I did this yesterday. Today I started doing it, but I had a lot of writing that I wanted to do, and didn't want to take ten minutes to do the exercise formally. And there are people that are so busy that they can't afford to take the time, despite the likely benefit.

So I came up with a variant as a starting point:

1. Do it once, to get the idea
2. Whenever you have a moment, (sitting at a stop-light, just finishing something, whatever) take the list of six items as a checklist, pick the one that needs the most work, and do it.
3. Alternatively, just take a minute or two and run down the list

My experience is that these small steps help.

And since part of my "Perfect day" involves having the time to do this, and a bunch of other, beneficial things, by applying step 4 and 5 to a future in which this is part of my life, and a perfect day in which I do this, I'll be reconditioning myself.

Likewise, this looks like a pretty good six item debug list. So I'm working from there, too.