How Meditation Changes You
You go into meditation blind, hoping you’ll come out a better person. You have a faint idea of how it’ll happen, but for the most part you’re putting faith into what people have told you. It could be that meditation is a very personal experience and the revelations happen in the mind, making them difficult to explain. It could also be that once you undergo a change, it’s tough to remember what you were like before. Whatever the reason, not enough words have been dedicated to actually explaining how meditation changes you.
I’d like to share what I’ve learned on the journey from first time meditator to where I am today. My goal is that in sharing the breakthroughs I had along the way, you’ll see the process by which meditation can change you. I’m not trying to convince everyone to meditate, but I hope that for the people that are considering it this might tip them over the edge. I’ll start with the beginning.
Learning to Let Go
I downloaded Headspace in July 2019. The meditations are led by a man named Andy. He had me sit down, get comfortable, and start taking deep breaths. Then he’d ask me to close my eyes, think about my motivation for meditating, and then perform a body scan to connect with the body. At this point the core of the meditation would begin. The goal was to focus on the physical sensation of the breath and return my focus to it whenever I got distracted.
The learning started early on. My interpretation of the goal of meditation was to maintain a clear mind for the longest time possible. I concluded that all thoughts are bad and that I should make them go away. So when I meditated, I tried to anticipate thoughts arising and stop them from getting too big. It’s like I was playing whack-a-mole with way too many moles. Some days my mind was clearer and I succeeded in keeping the thoughts at bay. Other days there were too many thoughts and I stood no chance. Either way it was exhausting. And the breath, which was supposed to be the focus of attention, went unnoticed for the most part.
Andy kept telling me to accept my mind as it is, and to let thoughts come and go. He was trying to tell me that there’s no such thing as a good mind or a bad mind, only one you’ve accepted or one that you haven’t. I tried applying his strategy of letting thoughts arise and linger as long as they please. Very quickly the strategy began to work. By accepting thoughts instead of shooing them away they dissipated much faster. What this required was courage to accept the chaos of my mind for what it was. This strategy allowed my meditation to have the element of peace; I was at peace with however my mind was that day.
This strategy ties into the larger Buddhist philosophy of wanting being the cause of all suffering. The ability to recognize when I’m wanting something and letting it go is maybe the number one skill I’ve gained from meditation.
I apply it everywhere in my life. When someone is disagreeing with me and I start getting annoyed, I realize the reason is that I want them to change their minds, so I let go of that desire. From there, I’m able to hear their point better, which usually makes them feel heard, which makes them more likely to agree with me. When I’m feeling not my best and I want to feel different, I let go of the want and accept how I’m feeling. This helps me shift to being grateful and appreciating the smaller things, which usually leads to me feeling better. In a counter intuitive way, letting go of what you want usually leads to getting what you want. But until you genuinely let go of the desire, you will not reap the benefits.
The Behaviour of Thoughts
Sitting back and watching thoughts come and go session after session gave me a deeper insight into what thoughts are. Before meditating every thought felt pressing and unique. Each one demanded my attention. But eventually each one went away and was replaced by another one. Seeing this process play out time after time made me see the truth about my thoughts.
I began to see the different flavours of thoughts. The mind’s go-to flavour is mulling over past situations. I rethink if I acted right, what I could’ve done differently, how I came off to everyone around me. When the mind wants a mature flavour it looks forward to future situations — I simulate in my head how things may play out. When the mind has exhausted those flavours it turns to its guilty pleasure, the thought ‘Am I Meditating Right?’ and more broadly ‘Am I Living Right?’. This is a thought like any other — it took me a while to see past its apparent productivity.
What connects all of these thought patterns, what makes them all so dangerous, is that they have no clear resolution. Until you get to the bottom of the thoughts you feel uneasy, and this is precisely what keeps you chasing them. The key isn’t to wrestle with them until they’re “solved”, but to accept the feeling of uneasiness that comes with letting them go.
Slowly, and against every instinct in my body, I started to let go of thoughts, even when they felt pressing. And more often than not I realized the thoughts weren’t so pressing after all. The moment I made the decision to let go, the mirage of urgency disappeared. This revealed to me something deeper about the brain — it artificially makes thoughts feel urgent. I already knew the brain was evolutionarily programmed to worry, because otherwise we wouldn’t be a very successful species. Witnessing urgent thoughts lose their urgency confirmed that theory through experience.
At the same time I had a corollary realization: chasing thoughts rarely leads to productive outcomes. What happens far more often is a loop of circular thinking that leads nowhere. Recognizing this statistical truth does not make thoughts any less tempting. But it does make it easier to let thoughts go, because you can be confident you aren’t missing out on much.
Thoughts are seemingly urgent and usually not productive — doesn’t that sound a lot like YouTube videos? Just like for YouTube, the mind’s goal is to maximize engagement. Whatever you interact with teaches the mind your interests and becomes the basis for thought recommendations. You know that feeling of needing to think a thought? Isn’t it awfully similar to the feeling of needing to watch a recommended video? Both are customizing content for you based on what they know you’ll find interesting. The only way to beat the algorithms is to change the way you engage with them.
This was the liberating idea: I don’t have to interact with the thoughts my mind offers up. It is a recommendation algorithm that is always running, and it’s up to me to decide when I accept the recommendations. Beware the critical distinction — I’m NOT trying to stop the recommendation algorithm from running. It will run forever. Instead, I choose which recommendations I accept and which I let pass. This is the process by which you change the recommendations you get, and by which you make thoughts less urgent.
The Breath
As I progressed as a meditator I accumulated a laundry list of mantras that I’d repeat to myself. “Watch thoughts pass by like cars on a highway”, “be comfortable with uncertainty”, “every thought that appears disappears”, and so on. Meditating became about propping these up while trying to ease into the breath and let thoughts go. The impossibility of this task became apparent — the mantras, useful as they are, are still thoughts.
What I noticed was that as I kept meditating, the mantras became self apparent. Initially they were all epiphanies, but the more I observed my mind, the more they felt like obvious truths. The need to keep them top of mind faded as knowledge went from declarative to implicit. The knowledge went from being in my head to something I understood intuitively.
With that my practice became much freer. It started to resemble the image we all have of the yogi: sitting in the lotus cross legged position, completely at peace. Allowing the mantras to disappear into the background, it became easier to give the breath my undivided attention. It became possible to notice every breath in its entirety, from start to finish. I was able to go fifteen minutes without losing track of the breath, without being derailed by a train of thought.
When you string together inhalation after exhalation, the experience changes completely. The breath becomes full and weighty; it develops a sense of momentum. Rich, dense (not airy), satiating and fulfilling. Even sweet. The meditation is transformed by how awesome the breath feels.
For me, this experience is what made meditation click. It became clear that it’s what I should be after every time I sit down to meditate. Meditation became “focus on the breath, and notice when you’ve been distracted”. If you recall, that’s exactly what Andy told me to do from the start. But that level of simplicity was unattainable at first. I had to wrestle with my thoughts and have epiphanies. I had to see for myself that the thought ‘Am I Meditating Right?’ leads nowhere. I had to experience the full depth of the breath. Only then could such a simple direction, “focus on the breath”, mean something profound.
Conclusion
If you’re thinking about meditating but aren’t sure what to expect, hopefully this gave you some insight. I hope to have communicated that meditation is a practice. It isn’t a quick fix. The genuineness you approach it with will directly impact how much you get out of it. This is the difference between the first time I started meditating — I expected meditation to do all the work, as if it was some magical fat loss product — and the second time, when I realized that I was the one who had to put in the effort. Be patient, give it time, and don’t wait for a big “aha” moment. You’ll just miss the smaller “aha” moments along the way.
