Opening

Walk-in period

• Be on time: You arrive at least five minutes before time, preferably even earlier. Never be late!

• Make a beautiful circle of chairs: Some people seem to skip this step, maybe because they're late or maybe they don't care—I don't know. It doesn't cost you anything, but it does improve the atmosphere. When a space is messy, it is harder to calm down.

  • When moving the tables, try to end up with a square empty space, preferably as large as possible.

  • Try to make a nice round circle with all the chairs facing the middle, with enough space between the chairs, so that nobody ends up in each others personal space.

  • Don’t use all chairs, you want to end up with at a bunch of empty chairs. So, start relatively small—around 7 chairs. When more people arrive, add some more chairs.

  • When the sessions start, you want to have at least one empty chair left, this way, when latecomers arrive, there is still a place to sit.

• Be kind and welcoming: Don't sit down in the circle, but actively offer people tea. Do some small talk. Ask them how they are doing. If they are new, you can ask them if they have any meditation experience. If they don’t, let them know there is nothing to worry about.

Opening talk

• Start three minutes late: The actual meditating always starts about 3 minutes late, so that stragglers can still make it. You can use this time to give a talk a little bit with the group.

  • Ask if there is anybody who has never meditated before, or who has never meditated with you before.

  • Why are you here?

  • How was meditating this week? Are there things you are running up against?

• Introducing meditation: If there are new people, give a short introduction to meditation. This is the most important part of the opening talk. They have never meditated before, and when you do it for the first time, it just doesn’t make any sense. Especially since meditation isn’t always relaxing, you want to make sure that they really understand that it’s still worth their time. Otherwise, they might never give it another try. More on this in the next section.

• Explain how the guided meditation will go:

  • I will be guiding you through the meditation. So don’t worry, if you still don’t know exactly what to do.

  • The meditation will take twenty minutes in total, with a small break in the middle.

  • During this break, you can stretch or take a sip of water, should you wish to. But you can also keep meditating.

Tip: If you find it hard to remember how to do the opening, that is perfectly normal. Just bring a little notebook with some keywords.

Introducing meditation

There are many ways of introducing meditation and below I show just two of them. You can use these or take some time to design your own. Exploring the question—what is meditation and why do I do it?—is extremely valuable anyway.

“We meditate to change the habit of the mind.” If you remember this, while fully understanding what it means, then you can simply unpack it in your introduction. Just ask yourself, what should a new person know that I know, too fully understand this sentence?

• Start by saying: “We meditate to change the habit of the mind."

• Then simply start unpacking:

  • What is the habit of the mind?

  • Why would I want it to be changed?

  • What is meditation?

  • How would meditation change the habit of the mind?

• You can even unpack it together with your group. Simply ask them the subquestions outlined above.

Alternatively, you can use: “We’re practicing to have a break.”

• Start by saying: “We’re practicing to have a break."

• Then simply start unpacking:

  • Where would we want to have a break from?

  • What does it mean to practice having a break?

  • How would this practicing help us in the long run?