There’s a visual language around activities like yoga and meditation that I’m sure you’re familiar with: images of the natural world looking tidy and inviting, and of serene, beautiful people outside at golden hour or sitting in white-painted rooms furnished with nothing but a plant and an incense stick. See below for a classic of the genre.
My head tells me that images like this are staged and fantastical; that they’re adverts for Big Wellness, and speak more to wealth and privilege than serenity (not that those things are necessarily unrelated). Nevertheless, when I see one my heart does a little skip and says: I want that.
If I’m honest with myself, the idea that I could one day reach a prolonged state of serenity, like I live in one of those images, has been the underlying motivation for my forays into meditation over the years. I once wrote in a diary entry that I was drawn to meditation because I wanted ‘a mind like the calm surface of a lake, with ideas bubbling up every so often from the bottom’. Maybe I’d seen this advert for the meditation app, Calm:
I like to think I’m wise to the machinations of advertising and more than capable of avoiding its influence, but it’s possible I’m a bit deluded.
Despite many attempts to start a regular meditation practice, I’ve never managed to stick with it in the long term — at some point, I always give up. Back in October I wrote an essay theorising about why this might be, and a few days ago I shared said essay to a Substack thread hosted by
, which resulted in a flurry of new and thoughtful comments.In the process of engaging with these comments and reflecting on what I’d written, I detected some flaws in my own thinking. This bit, for example:
The way I think of it, the fruits of meditation — focus, attention, mental clarity, greater compassion, ability to be in the moment […] — lie behind a closed door. Meditating regularly is akin to pushing at this door in the hope of one day walking through it.
Flawed! In this analogy, meditation will one day take me to a place like the one that exists in all those images. It’s the key to a hallowed realm in which my mind behaves as I want it to and I am finally the person I wish to be. It makes perfect sense to give up on meditation if you’re thinking of it like this — that’s to say, as a route to a destination. When you’ve been meditating for a few months and the destination feels no closer than it did when you started, you’ll naturally start to question whether it’s worth the effort.
Oliver Burkeman talks about this sort of ‘future-chasing mindset’ in Four Thousand Weeks, that book I was evangelising about a few posts ago. We are beset by a need to instrumentalise our time, he writes: to do things not simply for their own sake, but with some future goal in mind. It’s this mentality that tells us to value rest only insofar as it makes us more productive later, or to travel in order to rack up a list of countries visited, or to go out running so we can train for a 10k. In a confession that strikes painfully close to home, Burkeman writes that this attitude ‘infected’ him, too, ‘during the years I spent attending meditation classes and retreats with the barely conscious goal that I might one day reach a condition of permanent calm.’
I’ve meditated in pursuit of calm. I’ve meditated because I thought it would help me get my PhD thesis written. I’ve meditated in hopes of nourishing my creativity and quelling my health anxiety and curbing my screen addiction. I’ve meditated because I wanted to become more aware of the world around me and because I wanted to reach the blissful state I’ve heard is possible if you do it for long enough. But I don’t think I’ve ever meditated just to meditate, for no reason at all and with no purpose whatsoever except to improve the moment I’m in right now.
I suppose I’ve internalised the popular narrative around meditation, which is that it’s an investment to be made, a habit to be formed. The pay-off for your commitment is different according to your preferred lens. The medical lens says the reward is improved mental health, the capitalist lens says it’s improved productivity, and the spiritual lens says it’s a deeper connection to yourself and to others and to the world. I’ve got my own opinions about the value of each, but what they have in common is their orientation towards the future: the idea that there is something lacking in one’s current, present state, and that meditation is the way to fix it.
I don’t doubt that meditation truly does improve people’s lives if they practise it over the long-term. But I suspect that, paradoxically, my only hope of building a long-term meditation habit is to give up all hope of building a long-term meditation habit. If you’re doing something for its perceived future benefits it’s hard not to get discouraged when you fall off the wagon. But if you’re doing it only for now, there is no wagon to fall from.
I’ve been meditating this week for the first time in a while, and what distinguishes this meditation phase from all the many others I’ve embarked on is that I’ve stopped worrying about doing it ‘properly’. This has freed me to meditate on the train, to meditate for a mere ten minutes at a time, to meditate with my eyes open, to retire my meditation stool and sit in a chair instead, and perhaps most crucially, to allow myself not to meditate without angsting about having ‘blown it’.
My hope is that if I can learn to hold meditation a little more lightly, I can move past mournfully defeatist thoughts like this one, from my October essay:
Sometimes I feel like I could spend my entire life meditating and still the meditation door would only open enough for me to stick half a foot through.
There’s no need to bring the weight of my entire life to bear on it, after all. I’d argue that taking a few minutes for stillness and awareness is an intrinsically worthwhile thing to do that doesn’t need to be justified in terms of its future benefits. That’s not to say it won’t have future benefits. It’s just that they might slip from my grasp if I think any further ahead than today.
‘Til next time,
Kx
If you enjoyed reading this post, please hit the like button below so that others can find it too!
And as ever… your weekly reminder that if you like my writing you can support it by buying my book (UK edition / US edition) or sharing The Babbling Brook far and wide.
I've been doing TM for years, and the thing that Maharishi always said was "take it as it comes", and don't be concerned about the results. I go through times when I think it's had no effect at all, but over the long term it certainly has. I liken it to looking in the mirror. You don't notice the changes every day, but they become apparent when you look at a photo from years ago
It's wonderful to read that you're giving meditation another try, coming at it from a lighter and less-outcome-oriented place in yourself.
What's interesting about the way the historical Buddha taught about meditation is that it's intrinsically linked to a number of other concepts/practices, and was never intended to be a stand-alone. The Eight-fold Path in Buddhism consists of Right View, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. The idea, if I understand it correctly, is to be cultivating all those qualities/practices, not simply one of them. And they all support one another in a kind of holistic way. So it makes sense why a lot of us would run into problems with the meditation-only path, especially if we're trying to do it on our own without the support of a teacher and/or community.
I say this not to convert you or anyone to Buddhism but simply to offer a bit more context. Good luck with your practice!