What to Expect When You Meditate
The purpose, pleasures, and pitfalls of sitting
The first thing to know is that meditation is training. Gentle training, but still training.
So while it won’t change who you are, it will change you. (It’s tempting to go into it wanting the opposite.)
I started sitting in the early 1990s with a martial arts group, and I still got this part wrong for many years. You don’t use or deploy meditation like a tool or technique. You take it up — like an art, a career, a sport, a vow.
Meditating occasionally is a lot like occasionally picking up a paintbrush or a compound bow or a guitar. Not likely to do anyone much good. But making it the end-all and be-all of our lives doesn’t hash out too well either.
My tradition is Soto Zen shikantaza, or “just sitting”, which is goalless, open-attention meditation. It’s arguably the simplest form, and although that doesn’t make it the easiest to do, it does make for an excellent introduction point.
Why sit?
Meditation can lower your blood pressure, increase productivity, reduce anxiety, make you happier, slow down aging, end insomnia, break addictions, enlighten you, bring about world peace, and even more if you listen to everything that’s said about it.
