I usually start by cleaning my room. Vacuum the carpet if it needs it, put any stray clothes away, make my bed. Then I prop open a window, dim the lights, and burn some incense. Right now I have a bundle of Black Coconut sticks from an Ethiopian goods stall in Shepherd's Bush Market.
I then sit on the edge of my bed, palms on my knees, feet flat on the floor, comfortable but solid posture. For the past year or so, I was in the habit of starting my routine with a head to toe body scan, but recently that began to feel a bit hollow and rushed, so now I go directly into a simple breathing pattern. This is really just an inhale/exhale rhythm in small increments—”box breathing,” I think it’s called. In two seconds, hold two seconds, out two seconds, rest two seconds. In three seconds, hold three seconds, out three seconds, rest three seconds, etc.
Then I have a few checkpoints that help me drop the anchor: smooth my brow if it's scrunched (I like to imagine my skin like a baby's), loosen my jaw, and relax my tongue. Basically checking that all of the controls in the cockpit are functioning properly before takeoff. From there, it's a drift into my mind guided by the ambient sounds around me. I try to hear them in a detached way that bypasses my brain's desire to immediately label them, but I can almost always recall what I’ve heard hours later regardless. This morning was the swelling Doppler roars of a few planes, lots of delicate bird chirps, pop music from passing cars, front gates squeaking open, and some distant dialogue between what seemed like a mother and her young children getting ready to leave their home.
During particularly deep meditations, this mode of listening leads to a gentle toggle between two states. The first state is the aforementioned active listening combined with attention turned towards my breath. When the sounds, my breathing, and sometimes even my pulse all harmonize, it's like a cold freshwater river calmly flowing through a lush forest (coupled with the unshakeable sensation that my hands have become massive, for some reason). But this pleasure inevitably gets interrupted by the second state, which I envision as a conveyor belt of sequential thoughts. Sometimes these thoughts are related to topical anxieties but can often be quite abstract. This morning, I remember thinking of a stick insect, a lemon bar, and a past sexual experience before toggling back to the first state. The strange paradox of this practice for me is that when I'm really tapped in, I can let go of the thoughts on the conveyor belt almost as soon as they materialize, and yet the imagery associated with them frequently returns when I open my eyes. There are even some scenes that have shown up as nearly fully-formed painting ideas that have gone right to my sketchbook.