What Meditation Actually Is

The word meditation has a problem. It's been attached to so many different things, so many different practices and traditions and cultural contexts and commercial products, that it's stopped meaning anything precise and started meaning something vague and slightly intimidating. It suggests crossed legs and incense and a quality of serene blankness that most people's minds are nowhere near producing. It suggests spiritual credentials you may not have and a temperament for stillness you may not think you possess. It suggests, for some people, religion, and for others, the wellness industrial complex, and for still others, a practice for people who have more time and fewer problems than they do.

Most of what people think they know about meditation is either incomplete or wrong in ways that prevent them from discovering what the practice actually offers. This piece is an attempt to describe what meditation actually is, stripped of the cultural baggage, in terms that make it accessible to someone who hasn't found a way in yet.

The Basic Thing

Meditation, at its most fundamental, is the practice of directing attention deliberately and noticing when it wanders.

That's the core of it. Not blissful emptiness. Not the absence of thought. Not a special state of consciousness that requires years of practice to access. Just the deliberate direction of attention and the noticing of when it moves elsewhere.

Most people's attention, most of the time, is not deliberately directed. It goes where it goes, pulled by whatever is most stimulating or most urgent or most habitual, moving from thought to thought and sensation to sensation without conscious direction. This is the default mode, and it's not a problem exactly, it's how the mind works, but it means that most of the time most people are not really choosing where their attention is. They're following it.

Meditation is the practice of not following it. Of choosing a place to direct attention, and returning it there when it wanders, and returning it again when it wanders again, and again and again, for the duration of the practice session.

That's it. That's the fundamental practice. Everything else is elaboration on this basic structure.

What You Direct Your Attention To

Different meditation traditions direct attention to different things, and the differences matter for the character of the practice and what it develops.

The most common object of attention in most contemplative traditions is the breath. Not controlled breathing, just the natural breath as it happens, felt in the body at the nostrils or the chest or the belly. The breath is a useful object for several reasons: it's always present, it doesn't require any preparation or equipment, it's grounded in the body rather than in thought, and it has a natural rhythm that the attention can follow. We'll discuss the breath as an object of meditation in more depth in the next piece.

Some traditions direct attention to a word or phrase, a mantra, repeated silently or aloud. The mantra functions as an anchor, something to return to when the mind wanders, and the specific meaning of the mantra in traditions where it has meaning is understood to add its own dimension to the practice.

Some traditions direct attention to a physical sensation in the body, the sensations in the hands, the feeling of sitting, the contact of the body with the surface it's resting on. Body-based attention practices tend to be particularly useful for people whose minds are very busy and who find attention to the breath still produces too much mental activity.

And some traditions, particularly in the Zen and Tibetan Buddhist lineages, direct attention to awareness itself, to the quality of knowing that's present regardless of what's being known. This is a more advanced and more subtle object of meditation, requiring some foundation in other practices to access reliably, but it represents one of the deepest possibilities of the contemplative path.

For most people beginning a meditation practice, the breath is the most accessible starting point, and developing some familiarity with breath-based practice before exploring others tends to produce the most sustainable entry into contemplative work.

What Happens When You Try It

The experience of actually sitting down to meditate for the first time is reliably different from what most people expect, and often in the same specific way.

They expect difficulty maintaining attention, and they get difficulty maintaining attention. But the specific character of the difficulty surprises them. The mind doesn't just wander occasionally. It wanders almost immediately and almost constantly. The attempt to keep attention on the breath for even thirty seconds reveals a mind that is far more restless and far less under conscious direction than it appeared to be from the outside.

This revelation tends to produce one of two responses. Some people conclude that they're bad at meditation, that their mind is particularly wild compared to other people's, that the practice isn't for them. Others become genuinely curious about the mind they've just encountered, about the degree to which attention has been moving without conscious direction their entire lives without their noticing.

The second response is more accurate. The restless mind is not evidence of being bad at meditation. It's the normal mind, encountered more honestly than usual. Everyone's mind wanders in meditation. The teachers and practitioners with decades of experience still notice the mind wandering. What changes with practice is not that the mind stops wandering but that the noticing of the wandering becomes faster and more reliable, and the returning of attention becomes more practiced, and the whole cycle of wandering and returning becomes less distressing and more simply what the practice is.

What Meditation Is Not

Clearing this up tends to remove some of the most significant obstacles to actually beginning.

Meditation is not the achievement of a blank mind. The goal is not to stop thoughts from arising. Thoughts will arise. The practice is not about preventing them but about not following them, about noticing that they've arrived and returning attention to the chosen object without getting pulled into the content of the thought. The meditation teacher Pema Chödrön uses the image of thoughts as clouds passing through the sky. The sky doesn't need to be cloudless. The clouds come and go. The practice is the sky, the awareness in which the clouds appear, not the effort to prevent them.

Meditation is not relaxation, though relaxation sometimes accompanies it. The goal of meditation is not to feel good or to feel calm, though these are sometimes effects. The goal is the development of a particular quality of attention, and the development of that quality sometimes involves sitting with uncomfortable material rather than relaxing away from it. A meditation session that involved difficult emotions or persistent mental noise was not a failed session. It was a session in which the practice happened in the presence of difficulty, which is often when it's most valuable.

Meditation is not a spiritual requirement that requires religious belief. The contemplative practices that have been developed in various religious traditions can be practiced outside of those traditions, and the attention-training that is the core of most meditation practice has benefits that don't depend on any particular cosmological or theological framework. The growing body of secular mindfulness research and practice demonstrates this fairly clearly.

And meditation is not a quick fix for the challenges of mental or emotional life. It's a long practice, and its most significant effects tend to be slow and cumulative rather than immediate and dramatic. The person who tries meditation for two weeks and doesn't notice a significant change hasn't failed. They've just started. The benefits tend to accumulate in the way that physical exercise benefits accumulate, gradually and with some lag between the practice and the visible effects.

Why It Might Be Worth Trying

The research on meditation and mindfulness practice has been substantial enough over the past few decades to produce some fairly reliable findings, and the findings are worth knowing because they make the case for the practice more concrete than the general recommendation to be more present.

Attention regulation improves with sustained practice. The ability to direct attention deliberately and to notice when it has wandered, and to return it without significant distress, is measurably improved by regular meditation practice. This is not a small thing for anyone who does work that requires sustained attention, which is most creative work.

Emotional regulation improves. The capacity to be present with difficult emotions without being overwhelmed by them or immediately reacting to them tends to develop through contemplative practice. The specific mechanism is the development of what researchers call the observer perspective, the ability to be aware of an emotional state without being entirely inside it. This capacity has significant implications for the creative person who works with difficult material, who receives feedback, who shares work and navigates the emotional responses that sharing produces.

The relationship to the inner critic tends to shift. The inner critic is louder and more automatic in people whose attention is less regulated and whose relationship to their own thoughts is one of identification rather than observation. Contemplative practice develops the ability to observe thoughts, including the inner critic's thoughts, without automatically believing them or being commanded by them. The critic doesn't disappear, but its authority over the creative process tends to diminish.

And the quality of presence in creative work tends to improve. The creative session engaged with genuine present-moment attention is different from the one where the mind is partly in yesterday's difficult email and partly in tomorrow's deadline while nominally working on the current project. The presence that contemplative practice develops tends to show up in the work as a different quality of aliveness, of genuine engagement with what's actually happening in the work rather than what's happening in the surrounding mental noise.

Starting Simply

The entry into meditation practice doesn't require a teacher, a tradition, a cushion, a specific posture, or a significant time commitment. It requires a few minutes and a willingness to try something that will initially feel uncomfortable and pointless.

Sit in a position that's reasonably comfortable and that you can maintain without too much physical distraction. Close your eyes or soften your gaze to the floor. Direct your attention to the sensation of the breath in your body, wherever you feel it most clearly. When you notice the attention has moved to a thought or a sensation or a sound, notice the noticing and return the attention to the breath. Do this for five minutes.

That's the basic practice. Five minutes, once a day, with the intention of returning attention to the breath when it wanders. Not clearing the mind. Not achieving calm. Just the returning, over and over, for five minutes.

The five minutes will feel longer than five minutes. The mind will wander more than you expect. You will return the attention more times than seems productive. You will wonder whether you're doing it right and whether it's working and whether this is really a useful way to spend five minutes.

This is what the beginning of the practice is like for almost everyone. It's what the practice continues to be like, in different and sometimes subtler forms, for much longer than most people expect.

Do it anyway.