I lead a meditation group that meets in person a couple times a month. We’ve found we can get a laugh if we talk in the group about talking about meditation to others who don’t meditate by saying, “I can’t meditate. My mind is too crazy to empty it of thoughts,” or words to that effect.

Why does it make us laugh? Because it’s like a knee-jerk reaction that betrays a misunderstanding of meditation closer to its opposite.

Everyone’s mind is full of thoughts we can’t help. Meditation doesn’t empty your mind. Meditation can do many different things for different people, but a common goal is to find comfort with the eternal state of all human minds: scattered like yours.

We know that what they say is a reason to meditate, though they don’t.

It’s like saying, “I can’t take piano lessons. My fingers just hit keys on the keyboard just making sound, not music.”

Or “I can’t learn to eat healthy. I crave too much unhealthy food and doof.”

Or “I can’t learn to play basketball. I try to dribble and shoot jump shots, but the ball never goes where I want.”

Or “I can’t learn to stop interrupting people. When they say something I want to comment on, I can’t stop myself from saying what pops into my head.”

Without hands-on practical experience, we don’t know what we’re talking about.

Refining what meditation is

I hope those quotes illustrate the misunderstanding behind the too-common misunderstanding of the human mind and meditation. I’ve said them for a while, but only recently I noticed that they refer to practicing and learning things, whereas to meditate sounds doing something, not just practicing it.

That distinction led me to see meditation more like practice than doing something. Unlike, say, basketball where the point of practice is to compete in a game, or piano where you learn to perform, eventually to play a song, as far as I know, there is no professional level of meditation. You don’t perform it for others after you’ve mastered it enough. I guess some traditions say you reach nirvana, enlightenment, or something beyond the physical, but I don’t think people people expect to become so clearly enlightened that they become recognized for it.

In meditating, we’re all just practicing, like my friends who practice musical instruments or I practice physical exercise for the way it improves our lives.

If we’re just practicing, what are we practicing, then, and what for?

If we’re just practicing, what are we practicing?

I had to think about it. I can’t speak for others, but I’m practicing many things. Some examples include how to

• Remain calm even when my mind fills with chaotic thoughts
• Reflect before responding
• See how my mind works
• Infer how other people’s minds work
• Distinguish between motivation, impulse, desire, action, craving, and the like
• Not be bored
• Listen
• Create and process complex ideas and thoughts
• So what I said I would
• Act with integrity
• Respond with curiosity, empathy, and responsibility instead of judgment or blame
• Identify tension (physical and emotional) and release it
• Relax
• Act deliberately instead of react reflexively
• Know my priorities and values
• Act on my priorities and values
• Decline to act on non-priorities and what I don’t value
• Spend my time
• Consider my relationships
• Focus

and many others.

---

I have to take a new picture of myself meditating. This one is old, but the only one I have. I haven’t done a full lotus in years. Oh well, coming soon.

• ← My first time since starting not finding litter in Washington Square Park, because over six inches of snow covered it.
• Another time garbage nearly brought me to tears →