Online communities are a great place to meet like-minded people. Sara is one such friend I met in the nesslabs community. I reached to her with the following question about meditation.
I have been meditating for six months now. I can barely sit without thoughts for a few seconds during meditation. At times It makes to think that this is useless. Of course, once in a while during the day I catch myself being angry or frustrated for things not in my control. I would love to talk to you about your experience and get your insights about mediation.
She wrote a very thoughtful response. I thought others might benefit from her thoughts about meditation and its benefits. With her permission, I am publishing it here. Here is what she wrote back
I am not sure what style of meditation you are using, but I can speak to my experiences with learning to meditate in the Tibetan and Zen Buddhist traditions. What you’re describing sounds to me like a very common misconception about meditation — that it’s about clearing your thoughts. It’s not! Your brain’s job is to think — there’s simply no way you could stop it from thinking. That’s like asking the heart to stop beating, or the pancreas to stop making insulin. Impossible — and not what you want anyway! What meditation is really about is changing your relationship to your thoughts. It’s critical to understand this. When you meditate, you’re not trying to stop thoughts or quiet them, but more that you’re trying to become a witness to them. You’re trying to detach from them essentially. So each time you notice you are caught in a thought, you just put it aside and come back to the present moment. And you may do this 100 times or more in 20 minutes — that is a given! But over time, as you practice, it might get a little easier to do — both catching yourself when you’re lost in a thought and being better able to set that thought aside and come back to the present moment. As you get more practice, you might find you have a bit more time of emptiness of mind before another thought comes rushing in to fill the void, but you can’t really count on that either. I’ve been meditating pretty regularly for more than 10 years, and there are definitely days when my sessions are just full of thinking. (And lots of days where my mind is pretty empty but I’m also really bored, but that’s a different story, haha.) Anyway, if you keep doing this over time, a lot of amazing things happen. You start to know yourself better, for one thing. You start to see that your thoughts and feelings are in a constant state of change, sort of like the weather, but that the blue sky is always constant underneath it. I could write a lot about the benefits of meditating, but I think for starters you just have to remember that meditation is not just about emptying your mind and being calm. Those things do happen with regular practice, but in the meantime, you’ll find your brain dredges up a lot of stuff that you may not find pleasant. That’s just part of the process. A lot of people never make it past that fact alone, because, frankly, it’s difficult. We spend a lot of time in life trying to avoid or escape reality because reality can be really unpleasant. But it can be wonderful too, and again, over time, you begin to see that there is a full spectrum of emotions and thoughts present in you, just as they are present in the rest of humanity. Being able to experience them is a great privilege. It means you are having the full human experience, and learning to deal with the good and the bad and developing an understanding that you can live and even thrive through it all. So be kind to yourself — you are doing it right! The thing that is mysterious and awesome about meditation practice is that you gradually learn to lean into the idea that you’re not really in control. And while I get that that might make you angry at times, it’s ultimately the most liberating thing imaginable. I hope that is helpful! Here’s a link with Zazen instructions in case you are curious about learning to do Zazen, or Zen-style meditation. https://www.aczc.org/about-zen.
Sara writes a great newsletter about mental and emotional health called tinyrevolutions. You can subscribe to her newsletter here