This is the final pdf that I’ll include in the 2021 edition of my book. It’s a one-page guide to meditation:
For the other pdfs, I’ve tried to read around pretty extensively before I published. For example, for the pdf on starting fires, I read some survival guides, I googled the topic in different ways, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos. Eventually, the advice I was reading became repetitive and I decided I knew enough about starting fires to write the pdf. I might still be terrible at actually starting fires but I described the process in the same way as everybodyg else. It’s fine.
That’s not what happened with this meditation guide. The more you read about meditation, the more confusing it gets. The advice is often contradictory, even about the fundamentals or the purposes of meditation.
Eventually, I landed on four resources that seem simple and trustworthy: mindful.org, Headspace, the University of Vermont and Daniel Ingram. I read these a few times and then I wrote the pdf. The first three are near the top of the google results. Daniel Ingram is more arcane but his book is what got me into meditation in the first place and it’s excellent.
The pdf does not communicate all the history and theory of meditation, all the ins and outs, but I think it should be fine as a place to start.