Have you ever had the experience of sitting down to meditate and found that your mind was unwilling to surrender to your plans?
Try as you may,
Your focus just continued to be pulled away from your object of attention and into an unending stream of thoughts,
Stories,
And worries.
Yes,
If you're human then this experience has almost certainly happened to you.
Whether you're brand new to meditating or you've been practicing for years,
The object of meditation,
Particularly mindfulness meditation,
Is not to empty your mind but rather to train it.
Like taming a wild animal,
We have to train our minds to quiet down enough so that we can become present,
Which can at times be a frustrating process.
So frustrating,
In fact,
That many people give up on meditation because they feel that they're simply not good at it and this is where they're wrong.
While there are many forms of meditation out there which can produce various benefits,
For our purposes I'm going to focus on mindfulness meditation.
Specifically,
I want to talk about how bad meditations actually make you stronger.
To understand this concept,
I have to delve a bit into our current understanding around the neuroscience of mindfulness meditation.
As mentioned,
Mindfulness meditation is a technique that has many benefits but one of the most well understood is its ability to train our attention and keep us in the present moment.
Now,
Here is the important thing to understand.
Training your mind requires effort and the more effort you give,
The stronger your will becomes.
Imagine for a moment that you just sat for 10 minutes in what you may think of as a good meditation.
Your mind remained close to your object of attention,
Let's say your breath,
In and out,
In and out,
For 10 straight minutes your attention hardly wandered.
You open your eyes and you likely feel quite grounded and present.
Wonderful.
Now imagine a meditation where you sat for 10 minutes trying with all of your will to pay attention to your breath but every five seconds an intrusive thought came in and pulled your attention.
By the end of your meditation you may have spent two minutes with your breath and the other eight,
Well they were spent doing one of two things,
Either following the stories your mind was feeding you or,
However briefly,
Bringing your attention back to your breath.
While the first meditation may seem like a clear winner,
It's actually the second meditation that likely produced the most impact in your mind-body system.
Why?
Because every time you return your attention to your breath you're working your meditation muscle.
Just like doing reps at the gym that strengthen your muscles,
The act of bringing your attention to your breath creates and strengthens neurological pathways that reinforce your will to be present and mindful.
In these moments you're going toe-to-toe with your mind and when you bring your attention back,
Even for a millisecond,
You win.
In fact,
Research suggests that the act of bringing your attention back to your breath directly enhances gray matter in the prefrontal cortex of your brain.
That's the brain region that controls your thoughts and emotions and enhances impulse control.
So when viewed from this perspective,
It's actually the second meditation that would have provided more opportunities for you to work with your meditation muscle.
Bringing your mind back to awareness a handful of times in a meditation is good,
But doing it 20,
30,
Or even 40 times in a minute,
Well that's pretty powerful.
Ultimately,
Of course,
Our peaceful meditations bring about a sense of calm and groundedness that we likely won't feel after a so-called bad meditation,
But it's crucial to remember that regardless of how your meditation goes,
The act of sitting with an intention is always going to yield positive results and over time your will will grow stronger and you'll find that your mind's pull weakens and it takes less heroic efforts to keep your attention.
That said,
You can ask anyone that's been meditating for decades and they'll tell you that this push and pull of the mind is a never-ending game,
Which means essentially that we have a never-ending ability to strengthen our resolve.
What's important to remember is that your mind is not good or bad and its nature is mobile.
This means that when you're struggling to tame it,
It's not because you've failed or that your mind is against you,
It's simply that the mind moves,
It wanders,
And that's precisely what it's meant to do.
You're not meant to silence your mind,
But you can gain control over the power that it has over you.
This is your gift.
You can get bigger than your mind and you do this through your intention to come home to the object of your attention,
Be it a mantra,
Your breath,
Or some other object or sensation.
And while you'll never be able to change the nature of your mind,
You can change your relationship to its nature by continuing your practice,
Which incidentally will have a calming effect on your mind.
Furthermore,
By continuing to build that neurological pathway of presence,
You'll find that it's much easier to stay present throughout your day.
And when you're present,
You have a heightened ability to choose your actions and responses consciously without getting stuck in old patterns or thoughts or emotional reactions.
And this ultimately is how we change.
So next time you sit down for a meditation and you find that your mind is wandering,
Remember that every time you take your attention and bring it back to whatever your object of focus is,
You're strengthening your neural pathways and you're setting yourself up for more success in the future and a more steady mind that you may even notice that very day.
