A friend who I introduced to meditation recently asked, "Why do you meditate?" I've been thinking about this a lot and want to share my answer.
The reason I meditate is to train my mind to recognize the tone and tenor of awareness in each moment. This is my life, and I want to live it mindfully, in the fullness of experience.
I will live each moment in my mind: the formless amalgam of my sensations, emotions, and thoughts. I’m not a little man driving around in my head—I am it—at once existence and experience. To “live my best life,” as the kids say, I think I should pay some special attention to training my mechanism of attentional quality… mindfulness.
In the early 20th-century in America, you would likely have been asked, “why do you exercise?” Now in the early 21st-century, we understand that a consistent regime of exercise supports physical health. By exercising and eating right, you are healthier in aggregate, up for more and more activity. Similarly, meditation leads to a mind full of experience even in the most ordinary of moments.
Let me proselytize for meditation not only based in the improved quality of ordinary moments, but in some of the most meaningful, those of love and curiosity. Training on the meditation cushion supports greater mindfulness in conversation. You can sit in conversation with your loved ones, enraptured by the give and take of language and ideas and the subtleties of non-verbal communication. When the conversation tests your patience—let it—you have studied for this test and can become interested when your patience wains and you must begin again, recognizing the rising of emotion as just another mind state. Admittedly, this is pretty next-level real world mindfulness (and something I still preach more than practice), but once it sinks in, mindful conversation opens a loving awareness for others to share in.
Another life upgrade from meditation is as a new venue for curiosity. As I write this post, it is a beautiful late spring day, a gentle breeze blows the leaves, and the pollinators work over the flowers in their complex dance. My unique and integrated experience of this scene puts me in touch with the mystery—of life, the universe, and everything—all made of this formless likeness that is consciousness. What is my relationship to it? What even is the “my,” the thing-in-itself-in-time that I’m referencing? What processes are working at all levels down to the qualia and quantum to make it “real?” The taste of coffee in my mouth, the warmth of the sun, the sound of the windchime, the growing tears of gratitude for life and being loving awareness are all just right. Just right. I am in awe. Paradise can be recognized in this rare and wonderful life so full of meaning and mystery.
Like with exercise, meditation’s effort and results will vary by individual. Some of you will get it and readily commit to the practice, for others, it will seem impossible to investigate the nature of consciousness. There are myriad ways to practice and like many old traditions, some are wrapped in a pre-scientific understanding of the universe that are not to my mind helpful to the process of attaining a deeper connection with consciousness. However, I encourage everyone to try to meditate. Start with an app, like Sam Harris’s “Waking Up” app, which I still use daily, and work your way through the introductory course. Don’t worry about doing it right or that your stream of consciousness is a torrent that has uprooted every tree of thought and rock of emotion and just begin again with the concentration practice on the breath or other object of meditation. Better spiritual health is available in both the journey and the destination.
An interviewer once pitched the Dalai Lama a softball, asking the great monk what was his favorite time to be alive? He answered, a bit obviously, “right now.” This is what one hopes to attain from meditative practice—that while we work towards our plans and are presented with depictions of our histories—we bias this moment, no matter if its content is positive or negative, with our full attention. Training the mind to return to being the present moment, over and over as the mind wanders and requires redirection, is the practice; a life lived in loving-awareness is the payoff.