WHAT MEDITATION DOES

July 31st, 2019

The basic foundational ingredient of a meditation practice is awareness. It’s the opposite of having a head in the clouds.

To be lost in thoughts. 

Day-dreaming.

A meditative practice simply makes it more likely that you will take a step back and look at what’s going on.  Not just situationally but mentally.  For example, anxiety often emerges from some thought that we can’t stop thinking.  The thought might be about some impending event, or something embarrassing that happened.  In comparison, anxiety is rarely about what is actually going on in the moment.  A meditative practice equips someone with the ability to step back and recognize the anxiety, and the thought for what it is.  With enough practice, these detrimental feelings fade in their power and ability to consume our minds.  But even in the short term, merely being able to take a step back and recognize the intoxicating process that is occurring has huge benefits.

Ultimately, meditation poses a question to one’s self:

is this where I want my attention to be?

If the answer is yes, then great.

Otherwise, meditative practice allows one’s self to let go of the current mental concept or state.

What comes next is some what up to chance.  We can’t really predict what our next thought will be once the current thought is out of the way.

In this sense it’s a bit like sifting for gold.  We can constantly let go of the useless dirt and when a shiny nugget of gold comes along, we can hold on to it for a little bit.

Without this ability, we can get stuck thinking about some useless and potentially harmful object of mind for ridiculous amounts of time.

Our head is, essentially a static bucket of mud without the ability to sift. 

Meditation, at the end of the day, is a simple ability to sift out all the unhelpful mental….

stuff.

This episode references Episode 347: Predicting Thoughts and Episode 473: Bucket of Mud