Meditation Is a Profound Human Need
Meditation is the act of becoming intentionally aware of the present moment for an extended period of time. During this time, the goal is to allow distractions—thoughts and emotions—to come, realize they are there, and then return to the moment.
At first, this can sound bewildering. What does it mean to “be aware of the moment”? Are we not always aware? If not, how do we know when we are?
Learning to recognize this state of awareness is part of the goal and process. A common meditation technique is to focus one’s attention on the breath, following the bodily sensations associated with breathing in and breathing out.
Perceiving sensations is wholly different from being caught up in thoughts or emotions. The first implies a state of detached observation, the other, engaged activity. To meditate is to take the role of the passive observer, allowing thoughts to come and go, but refusing to engage with them and feed them.
The point of this exercise is to cultivate the awareness that the self is separate from its thoughts and emotions; that the self is the ever-present consciousness that perceives—the observer—while thoughts and emotions are temporary reactions that come and go. This detachment reduces their power, freeing the soul to simply be, without judgement and concern.
Being detached from one’s thoughts and emotions is not the same as being cold and distant. One still feels and thinks. The purpose is simply to not let thoughts and emotions define one’s experience of being in reality. Thoughts and emotions are reactions and interpretations—imaginary things we create in our minds. They are not reality itself.
To experience reality always through the colored lens of thought and emotion is to never experience it first-hand. It is like introducing a middle-man who obsessively assigns meaning to everything, regardless of whether that meaning is accurate.
If we never allow ourselves to perceive reality as it is, we lose contact with it. We begin to believe that reality is what our thoughts and emotions tell us it must be. We forget that these are interpretations—and often misleading ones at that.
Every time we sit down to connect with reality as it is rather than what we tell ourselves it is, we remind ourselves that we are not our emotions or our thoughts. When their interpretation of reality gives us a negative experience, this can help us through it, because we realize that this negative experience is not reality itself, but a meaning that our thoughts and emotions imbue it with, and that they can be inaccurate, volatile, and are always temporary.
Since this ability to detach ourselves from our emotions and thoughts is not achieved in a single session, but builds gradually over time, we must return to a state of meditation every so often. The commitment to recurring meditation is what we call a meditation practice. The word “practice” is important. It suggests a process, not an end state.
The meditation practice is an unending commitment to, at once, experience the present moment at a regular frequency and, at the same time, training the awareness muscle. The individual meditation session is an end in itself as well as a means to greater awareness in the future.
Importantly, there is no success or failure of a meditation session. It is not a “good” session because one remains aware of one’s breath for a large portion of the time, getting minimally caught up in invasive emotions and thoughts. It is not a “bad” session if one’s mind wanders incessantly, being completely out of control.
In both cases, the session is just that—a session, an experience, an iteration. The experience itself is the goal. It gave you a chance to observe the behavior of your mind and to practice doing so from a distance.
Meditation may sound like a niche activity, reserved for fringe individuals obsessed with health and wellbeing and a skew towards spirituality. While these are more likely to adopt a meditation practice, there is no particular reason why they alone should benefit from it. Its scope is much broader than that.
In reality, meditation is a profound and distinctly human need. Our highly developed consciousness allows us to interpret the world conceptually; to think about it; to reason; to feel emotions in response to our thoughts. But we cannot think and experience at the same time. These are separate states.
To think is to remove ourselves from the concrete experience of living. To be lost in thought for all of our life is to never really have lived. It is to remain distant to reality, living in a separate world of abstraction that does not exist except in our mind.
What a shame it is to go through life and never having experienced it first hand but perpetually relegating ourselves to the synthetic reality that our mind constructs, always coloring and interpreting every event and every experience, never letting it be just what it is.
It does not matter whether our tendency is towards positive or negative thoughts. In either case, we remove ourselves from reality and hide behind the meaning our thoughts decide to give it. We become slaves to narratives over which we have little control.
Would it not be nice to remove the middle-man once in a while, to simply observe and be? No judgement, no interpretation, just presence. The first-hand experience that reality is what it is, not what we tell ourselves it ought to be.
It is precisely because we are conceptual beings who can deal with reality abstractly that the need arises for practicing experiencing it concretely. All other animals do this by default, since they have no alternative. We are the only animal that can construct a parallel universe in our minds and live there for all of our life.
To start meditating, simply sit down each day for five minutes or however long you like, and focus your attention on your breath. Try to perceive its rhythm and how it touches every part of your body. Zoom in with as much detail as you can muster.
When the mind wanders, simply recognize that is has, accept it, and direct your attention back to the breath. No judgment. No shame. It is what it is. There is no pressure. You are not performing. You simply are.
Try this for a while and see how it feels.