First off, there are lots of different kinds of meditations, lots of different reasons why people meditate, etc. So this talk could be called “Why I meditate” but I’m not alone in this, and “Why People who Meditate like I do Meditate” doesn’t have much of a ring to it.
But your mileage may vary, and you really have to answer this question for yourself if you want meditation to be a part of your life. But maybe my thoughts are a starting point for your contemplations.
It's a radical notion to suggest that we can actually decide where we place our attention. In our distracted world we often feel like the days go by just bouncing between work, entertainment, chores, check lists and the other humans we have to deal with.
And our experience of doing those things is often not that great. We often don’t feel connected to the thing we are doing. We find we’re thinking about something else instead of writing our life’s work or talking with our child. We plan this big vacation, travel all this way, and then miss a big chunk of it because we are thinking about other stuff.
We can go through our life like we’re hovering above it, watching ourselves in a movie, not connected. Or, conversely, we can become so completely swept up in the intensity of the emotion, that we lose all perspective. We either feel overwhelmed and curl up in a corner, or we act out and treat other people badly.
Meditation is a tool to find balance between being too absorbed and overwhelmed and being too distant and disconnected.
Meditation is a way of exploring our current human experience, just as it is. It’s a way of discovering our blind spots, our habitual, maybe outdated thought patterns. Meditation simultaneously helps you connect more deeply with your life, and not take yourself so seriously.
Meditation is like exercise, in that it takes practice, you get stronger over time, and doing a little every day compounds. But it’s not like exercise in that it’s not a self-improvement project. You don’t get ripped abs meditating. Believe me.
What you’ll find, the more you meditate, is that you become more yourself than ever, and “your self” becomes harder and harder to define.
In that way, I believe meditation brings us closer to the deepest experiences we can have… a sense of open awareness, deep connection, and grounded, ordinary being.
How does meditation do all that?
The main way it works is by stopping. Not doing.
We live our lives filled up with projects, next steps, inputs of all kinds. We don’t even sit on the toilet to take a shit without pulling out our phone. We love to be doing things.
Meditation carves out a little window in the day where we can take a break from all the inputs. We can stop gorging our mind on external stimulus and just relax.
It sounds so nice! Develop peace! Reduce stress! Relax. Netflix and chill.
Anyone whose ever meditated before knows that it’s not that simple! When we stop shoveling external inputs into our life, we find that our internal experience is actually super rich, chaotic, wild and very very deep.
But the first way meditation works is to give us a little segment of the day where we aren’t adding more to the mix. We’re not doing anything else.