Most of us know that a quiet mind is a rare treasure. We sit down to meditate with good intentions, and within seconds, our thoughts wander off to emails, errands, or something someone said last week.It’s not a failure of willpower but a reflection of how busy modern life has made our inner world.Recently, the Dalai Lama sat down for a conversation with the Ten Percent Happier Podcast and offered a gem of advice for anyone struggling to focus during meditation. What he described wasn’t a quick fix or a gimmick, but a way of approaching stillness that treats concentration less like a test to pass and more like a practice to return to, again and again, imperfectly.Here are some tips from the Dalai Lama to help concentrate better during meditation:
photo: @DalaiLama/ X
Meditating on the nature of the mind
The first practice the Dalai Lama gave was quieting the senses to observe the mind itself, separate from thought and sensory input. It’s less about forcing focus and more about noticing the awareness that sits beneath it. Podcast host Dan Harris admitted the technique didn’t sound simple at first, even though it is based upon well-established Tibetan Buddhist analytical meditation.
Reflecting on the kindness of others
The second practice is based upon gratitude, specifically, recognising how much of our daily comfort depends on other people’s effort. The Dalai Lama has popularly stated that genuinely wanting happiness means cherishing others first, since caring for people around us tends to settle our own minds far more effectively than self-focus ever does.
Dalai Lama recommends practicing meditation in the morning
He says that both meditations work best when done together, early in the day, before the mind gets pulled into distraction. The suggestion is to start small, just a minute of focused attention, and let that stretch gradually to five, then ten minutes over time, building a deeper connection to one’s own awareness.
Meditation should be consistently improved, not perfected
According to the Dalai Lama, one useful way to think about this practice is to compare it to jazz, learning the basic structure, then working upon it to make it better based on your own mind that day. No two sessions need to look similar, and that’s fine. The point was never flawlessness; it was always about coming back to it every day and working with whatever the mind offers in that moment.
Building the habit as a daily practice
Meditation, much like learning an instrument, rewards consistency over intensity. A few minutes a day, repeated patiently, tend to matter more than a single long, perfect session. Even complete beginners can have a genuine experience with these two meditations from the very first attempt, which is part of what makes the Dalai Lama’s approach so accessible and simple.
