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.
The Challenge: Living in a Distracted World
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.
What Meditation Does
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 It’s a way of discovering our blind spots, our habitual, maybe outdated thought patterns.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 Meditation Works
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.
Step 2: Develop a Reference Point
The second step is to learn to place our attention on something. Some of you find this easier than others. But everyone, with enough practice, can develop the ability to place your attention on something.
Why is this important? Because once we stop doing, stop adding stuff into our experience, we discover this vast, wild internal world, and we need a reference point. The main reference point we teach at Mindful Aware is “The feeling of the body breathing”. You can use different ones. I first started meditating with “the outbreath” as my reference point. But we usually talk about “The feeling of the body breathing” because it’s more grounded, more down to earth.
You can all do this now. We will try it in a moment. But before that, I just want to bring up the third step, and the core attitude that makes meditation work.
So you have set yourself up - you have some time, you have your posture, you aren’t adding any more external stimuli into your experience for just like 10 or 15 minutes. That’s step one.
The second step is developing a reference point. You are learning to place your attention on “the feeling of your body breathing” for example. When you get lost, when you lose track of it, you gently, kindly, encouragingly, bring your attention back. Or you could say you expand your attention again to include the feeling of your body breathing.
Step 3: Explore Your Inner World
The third step is that you explore. You observe. You listen. You wait. You see what comes up. This to me is why meditation helps us both become more connected to our life, and less overwhelmed by its intensity.
We explore what our own inner life is like. We can relax, get to know, come into relationship with this vast interior part of ourselves that we really don’t know that well.
Sometimes it’s shocking. Sometimes it’s dull. Sometimes we have to listen to the same thought pattern a thousand or a million times before we learn what it means. Or before we get so sick of it that we can stop repeating it. Either way, by meditating, we gain access to a vast internal world that we live inside of, but we don’t really know well at all.
Why Meditation Is Worth It
The basic bet with meditation is that by exploring our inner experience for like 5% of the time we are out in the world doing things, our life will be richer, deeper, better. We will cause less damage in the world, and create more good.
I have made that bet, and it’s been an immensely good one. To me, that is the reason to meditate. Ok, let’s try it.
We train, we practice, to build muscles in both of those areas, so we are capable and confident in doing both kinds of attention. And in fact, we work on combining them.
Why is this important? What we pay attention to is literally how we live.