The Chaos of Meditation

Meditation is often a relatively chaotic experience for my mind. I rarely experience true peace or bliss or feelings of enlightenment when I meditate. When it’s not chaotic, it can feel anticlimactic and honestly somewhat boring. Sometimes I wonder whether meditation is an efficient use of my time. So why do I continue to meditate?

Partially because all of the people I look up to have a meditation practice. Because the ancient Buddhists and Hindus practice meditation and wrote thousands of texts about it. Because modern science has agreed with ancient Eastern philosophy in that people who meditate are healthier, healthier, and less stressed.

Meditation can feel chaotic because it exposes all of the strange, irrational, and frustrating thoughts that my mind creates. It also shows me all of the beautiful and compassionate thoughts. Sometimes it feels like there’s a lot to process, other times it feels tedious and pointless. What I’ve found is that meditation, whether enjoyable or not, creates spaciousness between our thoughts and our reaction to those thoughts. It also creates awareness into the wiring of our minds, and helps us gain knowledge about our Samskaras - our unconscious thought patterns, reflexes, and conditionings.

So meditation is less about creating a perfectly calm and blissful experience, and more about bringing awareness into the mind and body — we can then bring this sense of awareness into how we show up in the world, creating a more mindful life for ourselves and our communities.

Meditation isn’t always fun, and often it exposes the darker sides of oneself. It forces us to do the work and deal with our stuff. It’s important to remember that we’re not our thoughts, we’re simply witnesses of our own mind. We must have compassion for the being in the mirror, because we don’t get anywhere by putting ourselves down based on what our meditation practice reveals.

The magic is in the practice. The magic is in looking back 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, and notice the difference in our lives based on a simple and efficient meditation practice.

Blessings, my friend.