Why I think you should meditate
T he first time I tried to meditate I was 13, and in a history class at school. My teacher, inexplicably, and perhaps driven to such lengths by a class of 20 teenagers, took it upon himself to try and get us to relax using mindfulness techniques. Or, what he thought were mindfulness techniques.
We all closed our eyes, and took some deep breaths. His first, and effectively only, instruction was the following:
“Clear your mind, please”
Obviously, it didn’t work. I watched thoughts emerge in my brain, yelled at them to go away, and grew frustrated as they invited their friends in instead.
I’ve since realised what awful advice my teacher gave me. You can’t just clear your mind. Even if you ask it politely. Especially to a teenager whose mind is a crackling tesla coil of insecurity, bubbling ego and sex.
15 or so years later, I discovered meditation properly. I’ve now become one of those annoying people who bangs on about it all the time.
Meditation has helped me become less anxious, more present, more creative, and more aware of what is actually going on in my mind.
Meditation is forgetting where you are, by knowing exactly where you are.
What I mean by that line is that when you meditate¹ you can, very pleasantly, begin to lose your sense of self. You can do this by paying very, very close attention to the present moment.
The problem with the present moment is that it’s often very boring. Unless we stimulate ourselves. We love stimulating ourselves. I often stimulate myself for hours on end.
We are hyper stimulated all the time. As a race of animals, a lot of our time and energy has been spent developing an intoxicating array of wonderful and powerful images, toys and strategies that do an excellent job of stopping us from thinking.
However, although we are not thinking, we are doing so because we are distracted, not because of any conscious effort. In this state, we are not truly relaxed. I have discovered there is a huge difference between not thinking as a result of distraction, and not thinking as a result of attention.
The problem with all those flashing, frenetic, exciting distractions is that they invite and seduce our attention with frightening effectiveness. That’s what they’re for.
With meditation, and standing in competition for our attention, is the public service “present moment” talk show. This week, and every week until the end of time, it features the feeling of your body pressing down on the chair, the distant hum of traffic, and the sensation of breath transiting in and out of your body.
Because we actively need to force ourselves to pay attention to something seemingly mundane, we end up training the muscle of attention itself. The “rep” as it were, is nudging your attention back to the subject of your focus when it inevitably drifts. You do this gently, without judgement, and without getting annoyed.
The problem with training your attention is that it is very annoying. In Buddhism there’s a term called monkey mind² which refers to a restless, distractible, sometimes incoherent mind. We all have that. For me, meditation helps me to work better with it, rather than against it.
Rather than dragging your monkey around and trying to stop it doing its thing, meditation helps you get along with it better, take from it what you want, and not have to get distracted by it when it just wants attention.
“Of course you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flat iron.” ³
Your brain is made to think, and without any distraction it tries really hard to do that all the time.
Annoyingly, even though your brain has licence to get angry with you any time it wants about something arbitrary and forgettable, you need to treat it with kindness when meditating.
If you get frustrated with your brain when it wanders, and try to stop it thinking by holding it down, it will slip out of your fingers like a snake made of soap, and multiply itself into many more snakes made of soap, and you’ll be thrashing around in all the snakes and then you’ll be replaying that conversation you had with that old mate you bumped in to, or worrying about a deadline at work, or tonguing at that strange indentation in on of your upper molars and trying to figure out if its new, or winning an argument in your head in a conversation that you will never have, about a subject you know nothing about, with someone you are terrified of.
Meditation in practice is, ideally, a few minutes where you give yourself a break from the obsessive, indecisive, repetitive and unhelpful problem solving our brain often attempts when it is left to its own devices.
You cannot stop thoughts — rather, you can watch them appear, acknowledge them, and then decide not to indulge them.
But — should we just be avoiding thoughts we don’t want to pursue? Difficult thinking is good, right? Difficult thinking is what leads to ideas, resolutions, decisions. And should we not indulge negative thoughts altogether? Sometimes we need to feel guilty don’t we? Sometimes we need to regret, or mourn, or become angry.
There’s a really interesting, but maybe a little overwrought, piece in The Guardian about the Mindfulness Conspiracy that talks about the relationship between the corporate world and meditation, and how it can be used to avoid thinking about gross ethical decisions, and the problems with the systems we live in.
There’s truth in that, I think. Meditation can be viewed as just a tool, and I’m sure people do use it to avoid important analysis of their situations. I have to say that my experience with it has been quite the opposite, however.
It’s all about balance — I do not think you should not use meditation as a way to check out from the world, kick back and listen to it all implode around you.
Importantly though, I also know that I don’t make good decisions when I’m anxious. Someone who is fretful and distressed, someone who could really benefit from meditation, is arguably less likely to be determined or able to change the course of their life, or the world around them.
We have a habit of wasting our energy on unhelpful thought patterns. I know I certainly do. The quality of thoughts that I am talking about not indulging in are not creative or conducive to real-world application. Running around thinking things feels useful, but only because the act of thinking itself makes the brain feel as if it is being helpful, and it wants to feel helpful. All the time.
Without direction or intent, the brain can devolve into a feedback loop, a device turned on accidentally, an empty tumble dryer getting hot, loud and distressed for no particular reason.
I think that daydreaming and playfulness of mind are key ingredients to an enjoyable life. We shouldn’t try to be in control of our minds all the time. But I do know that when I feel the most creative and awake to ideas, it is when I am purposefully in the moment, when I am completely absorbed in the making of something, and meditation helps me to not get distracted when I am in that that.
Creativity is really important to me. I like making things. I often don’t have an end goal in mind or even intend to show it to other people. I think everyone should do it just do it because it’s fun.
When I first started meditating I worried it might make me make me less creative. If my brain was spending less time spinning around, would I come up with less ideas? For me, creativity is one of the most rewarding parts of this little hustle of diodes popping on and off in our craniums.
Creativity is also pretty hard to pin down. Where do good ideas come from? Well, I know for a fact that I cannot force an idea to happen. It’s more of a partnership with your creativity. You can set up situations and conditions which are more conducive to ideas, or solving problems, but often ideas will still appear whenever they like. Tom Waits has a good line on this:
“You know, it’s the same thing as the question of free will and destiny, the question of creativity — you, the artist, you’re not the puppet of the piano, you’re not the puppet of the muse, but you’re not its master, either. It’s a relationship, it’s a conversation, and all it wants is to be treated with respect and dignity — and it will return ten thousand times over.”
I think this train of thought can be applied to thinking in general. If you start to imagine your thoughts less as something that you have actively put together yourself, and more as self-constructing golems strolling out of the deep mists of your weird brain to be agreed with or discarded, it becomes clear that we don’t actually think our thoughts — they just happen to us, like all the other information that is thrown at us via our sense organs.
We think automatically. We can direct our brain to think about certain things, and ask it to combine certain ideas, but we never really think in manual. It’s always automatic. We make decisions on what the brain produces, but thinking is always a dialogue between the subconscious and the conscious.
I think this is a very helpful way to think about the brain.
When not directed, when our subconscious completely takes over, our grey matter can sometimes become unhelpful, tiring, unpleasant, and even destructive. Sometimes our brains aren’t our friends, and meditation is also a good way of ignoring your brain if it’s just being a wanker.
More importantly, and more rewardingly, meditation allows you to be more awake to the present moment.
How often when we are doing one thing, are we actually doing another in our brain? When you are in nature are you actually there, or are you thinking about something else? When you are listening to music, are you really listening to it, or are has your brain drifted off to some conversation you had earlier? When you are on holiday are you thinking about work? The compulsion to be doing one thing, whilst thinking another is a sad fault of the human condition.
I have always found that my appetite for unnecessary overthinking is insatiable. I think that obsessively and compulsively planning, evaluating and criticising is a symptom of anxiety. Even if those thought patterns are not actually achieving any of those things, that illusion of ‘helpfulness’ remains, even when its result is quite unhelpful.
It means that when we could be in the present moment, taking it for what it is, and gaining more from the present experience, we find ourselves pulled back to stale, repetitive and frankly boring thought cycles. By meditating, we become better at noticing when we have drifted from our present, and can pull ourselves back to it.
Most the time, despite all of the stresses, traumas and distractions we are assaulted with by, and within, our minds, for many of us the present moment is most often not agitated by turmoil and punctured by immediate threats to our wellbeing.
Looking at the entirety of human experience, we are very lucky for this to be the case, and should make more of it. For a few minutes, the present moment can be a quiet place away from our internal distractions, and something of a haven.
There is a lot that is outside of our control at the moment. That is a gentler of way of saying everything’s a bit shit at the moment. For me, meditation helps you focus on the gentle, imperceptible-until-perceived, background hum of reality that sits all around you.
You can tune into it for free. And there genuinely is a feeling of bliss or contentment that seems to invite itself into your awareness when you are able to really lose yourself in the practice.
There are also multitudes of studies extolling the benefits of meditating. It improves mood, memory, cognition, and a whole host of other things.
It’s not magic, and it’s not mystic, but it can feel a bit like both of those things.
If I haven’t sold it, watch this video of David Lynch talking about Transcendental Meditation.
It’s a great mix of completely compelling and completely batshit.
¹ Strictly, I mean mindfulness meditation. The bulk of my own practice is either focussing on my breath, or trying to maintain an open awareness to everything going on. I find the second much harder, but when it works it can sometimes feel quite euphoric.
² Monkey mind or mind monkey, from Chinese xinyuan and Sino-Japanese shin’en 心猿 [lit. “heart-/mind-monkey”], is a Buddhist term meaning “unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable”.
³ I like Alan Watts. I think he provides interesting thought experiments and ways of conceptualising the world that are quite fun to indulge in, and often quite helpful as well.
