For the past few months, I have gone back to focusing on counting the breath during my meditation, which is a form of meditation I probably first learnt more than thirty years ago. For this practice, the focus is on the breath out, and to help with concentration, I count a slow, silent ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’ and so on during each outbreath, up to ten, and then start back at one again. It sounds pretty straight-forward, but can actually be surprisingly difficult to do, as my mind would much rather be busy planning or strategising or fantasising than simply being present with the breath.

It can be very grounding and reassuring to go back to basics, whether in meditation or in other parts of our lives. There is a sense of ensuring a strong foundation, on which we can then place the many often complex components of our lives, like the wooden beams and bricks of a well-built house. Ensuring a strong foundation is not nearly as exciting as choosing curtains or buying new furniture, but a house with unstable foundations can soon start to show the cracks. Sometimes, we can be tempted to look for complex or high-tech solutions, while neglecting the fundamentals such as nourishing food, exercise, sleep, and rest.

I often find myself unwittingly doing this – trying to devise intricate systems for managing my life when much of the time, what I need to be doing next is actually quite simple and straight-forward. Our lives are filled with countless tasks we dismiss as ‘chores’, but these chores are like our foundation. When they’re taken care of, there is hopefully still room for excitement, creativity, for the new and the stimulating. It’s about finding a balance which works for us – some people are quite content at home, whereas others love travel and excitement. It is terrible to be caught in a life of endless drudgery, but it can also be destabilising to be constantly in search of new excitement. When I was backpacking around India in my twenties, I sometimes met travellers who had been on the road for years. They often seemed a bit lost, as if they’d spent too long in the company of strangers, without the familiarity of a community and routine.  

We’re often encouraged to search for external solutions – buy this, subscribe to that, go to this workshop to turn your life around. All these external resources can be helpful, but they can also become excessive, superfluous, an end in themselves. I recently heard the meditation teacher Ayya Santacitta talk about how we can ‘leak’ our energy through our thoughts and behaviours if they’re too uncontained. Going back to basics could be about reducing some of those leaks, developing a stronger container to be filled with essentials rather than living like a sieve which barely notices what passes through.

It is one of the aspects I used to enjoy about going camping – all your essentials could be carried in a backpack, and a single rubber band become a valuable commodity to be stored with care. Going back to basics is not about being simplistic, but it can help to ground us, and to nurture that which is most sustaining in our lives.

Mindfulness practice:

Think about an area in your life which is feeling overly complex. Is there an activity you could do to bring this area ‘back to basics’? Set aside some time to do this activity in a slow, mindful way, and notice yourself becoming more grounded and focused as you do this. What did you notice?

Anja Tanhane