Why Bother Meditating?

“Though the world is torn and shaken
Even if your heart is breakin’
It’s waiting for you to awaken
Someday you will
Learn to be still.”—Eagles, Learn to Be Still

 An Unsatisfying Present

Throughout life, we are conflicted about the present moment. As children, we long for the freedom of adulthood; as adults, we envy the carefree ease of childhood. Whether romanticising the past or exalting the future, we often wish to be someplace other than here, now.

We crave deliverance from the present for a simple reason: experience is rarely satisfying.[1] Our minds evolved in a world where contentment courted extinction. Perpetually satisfied organisms may have led happy (yet brief) lives, but without the compulsion to eat, seek shelter, and reproduce, their lineages would have died out. In this way, the potential for effortless, lasting satisfaction was bred out of us. Now we live lives of monotony—or worse—interrupted by pleasures that soon fade.

Faced with a mundane present, we place our hopes for fulfilment elsewhere. Yet in seeking happiness in some future moment—or in the echo of a past one—we weaken our capacity to enjoy the present, which is, after all, the only place enjoyment can occur. When the conditions for contentment finally arise, we often miss them because of our inability to drop the search for happiness. We seem caught in a double bind, with lasting satisfaction always just out of reach: by chasing it, we shape minds incapable of resting in it—but without the chase, how could we ever find it? Is sustained satisfaction a myth, a mirage we can’t help but pursue?

Counter-Intuitive Satisfaction

A more durable form of satisfaction is possible, but only by learning how not to search for it. This may sound paradoxical. For most of us, contentment seems attainable only by pursuing pleasant experiences—and the fleeting rewards we find along the way appear to justify the restlessness of the chase. Yet the incessant search for happiness—or avoidance of suffering—obstructs the very experience with which we want to connect. Recognising this vicious cycle, some people tell themselves to “live in the moment”. At best, this merely interrupts experience with a thought about experience; at worst, it adds frustration when the mind refuses to obey.

Although rarely recognised as such, enjoyment of the present moment is a skill—and, like any skill, it can be developed through practice. Yet most of us never learn how to practise it. Instead, we tie our minds in knots thinking about how wonderful it would be to live in the now. But no skill can be mastered by thought alone.

This is where we go wrong when trying to enjoy the present moment: we attempt to think our way to contentment, as if reflection could substitute for practice. We cannot reason our way into presence any more than we can think our way into music or athletics. To develop any skill, we must use awareness to guide experience down counter-intuitive paths until they become second nature.

We already use awareness to refine ordinary skills—musical, mathematical, or linguistic. In the same way, we can apply it to the raw materials of experience itself: perception, emotion, and thought. But this requires a different kind of attention from the focused awareness used for specific tasks. To inhabit the present more fully, we must strengthen our capacity simply to remain aware—of whatever is happening.

Though no special method is needed to develop awareness—paying attention is, after all, one of the simplest things we can do—most people struggle to stay focused for more than a few moments at a time. (If you doubt this, pick up your phone the next time it dings and concentrate on ten slow breaths before you check it.) Fortunately, just as we have teaching methods for music or mathematics, there are reliable techniques for cultivating awareness. The most time-tested of these is meditation.[2]

At its core, meditation is simply the act of paying attention to whatever arises in any moment: thoughts, sensations, sights, sounds, or feelings. Such instruction may sound banal, especially compared to pop-culture portrayals of meditation, and practice often is boring, at the start. Yet trial, error, and even boredom are inescapable parts of learning any skill. After an initial investment, however, the rewards that follow naturally inspire further practice.

Early Meditation Hang-Ups

Many people are deterred from meditation by their inability to sit with a quiet mind—but that very difficulty is the reason to practise. If you can’t sit and focus when removed from the noise of daily life, you’re unlikely to remain aware in its midst. People often say they can’t meditate because they lack concentration or their minds are too noisy, but this is like an out-of-shape person claiming they’re too unfit to exercise. Just as exercise reliably builds fitness, meditation reliably strengthens focus—regardless of inborn ability.

Most skills show clear signs of progress. As we gain fitness, we grow stronger and faster; as we learn music, we sound better; and as we study, we retain new ideas. With meditation, however, progress is harder to measure. Nobody can show us what proper meditating looks like, and because thoughts are so persuasive, we often struggle to know whether we’re truly meditating or merely sitting in a lotus posture, thinking about meditation from time to time. It’s easy to tell when I haven’t yet mastered “Stairway to Heaven” on the guitar, but how am I to know whether I’m paying attention to experience—or only thinking I’ve been paying attention?

Many teachers have tried to guide students past such mental snags by charting the meditative terrain in exhaustive detail. These “maps” can be helpful, but they also carry risks. It can feel reassuring to measure one’s practice against expert descriptions, yet continually checking progress against fixed criteria runs counter to the very aim of leaving obsessive thought behind.

Moreover, unfamiliar experiences rarely translate well into words—as anyone who has ever endured a friend describing an acid trip knows—so such accounts are easily misinterpreted. We might spend years meditating on Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj’s skilful instruction to focus on the feeling of “I am,” without ever realising what he truly meant. And because minds and experiences differ from person to person, expert guidance may not always be reliable.[3]

Why We Suffer

Rather than searching for specific signs of meditative success, we can avoid many pitfalls by seeing how our own habits cause us to miss the moment—and to suffer. This primes us to notice the (avoidable) tendencies that keep us locked in dissatisfaction. Because awareness is weak, we often fail to see that nearly every problem—including the boredom that arises in meditation—stems not from external conditions but from how attention is distributed in each moment. Suffering is not inherent to experience; it foments through thinking about experience.

At the nucleus of all suffering—physical or emotional—is the tension born of wanting conditions to be otherwise. This is an important insight: we suffer because we want reality to differ, and such wanting largely operates through thought.[4] At first glance, this may seem mistaken; a broken heart or a broken limb appears to cause suffering in and of itself. But suffering is not something so tangible—it arises from how we relate to events. When we see how thoughts of what could be make us dissatisfied with what is, we begin to loosen one of the main impediments to connecting with immediate experience.

The Downside of Thought

Every tool can be used for good or ill: fire warms but also burns; guns protect but also kill; cell phones connect but also distract. Thought, too, is a powerful tool—but we extend it beyond its proper use and suffer needlessly as a result. By relying too heavily on thinking to solve our troubles, we strengthen the very habit that keeps us from satisfaction in the present.

Most human suffering arises from a single habit: wishing that experience were other than it is. Whether we want to be a different temperature, be engaged in a different activity, or have behaved differently in the past, this craving to alter conditions often governs the quality of our lives. In reality, most of us have no serious problems beyond the thought that we have one; rarely are we deprived of food, safety, comfort, or companionship.

We can never feel a pressing problem without feeling the urge for experience to change. Imagine breaking a leg but being perfectly at peace with the pain—if you didn’t want the sensation to go away, could there truly be a problem? Pain and dissatisfaction appear only when we turn from what’s felt, construct a more ideal world in thought, and fail to make it real. Because the mind can imagine endless improvements, dissatisfaction is possible under any conditions.

Often, our woes could be eased by simply letting thoughts fall away. Instead, we do the opposite, turning problems over in our minds until they swell. Well-meaning friends may tell us to “just stop worrying,” but the knowledge that thinking is futile rarely frees us from it.

We ruminate because we can’t do otherwise. Our relationship to thought is like that of an addict to a drug: we return again and again despite the resolve not to. Efforts to stop thinking fail because those efforts themselves take the form of thought.

The Limits of Thought

When faced with the problem of accessing the present moment, most people try to do so by sheer force of thought. But thinking our way to awareness cannot work—for the same reason that thinking our way to any skill cannot work. Thought can point the way, but only experience builds ability. We may think about swimming, playing music, or driving, yet only through direct engagement do those skills mature. Awareness is no different.

Our confusion about thought’s limits is captured when people marvel at a skilled performance: “She’s barely even thinking about it!” Of course she isn’t—if she had to think about it, the performance would collapse. We think most when skill is absent.

To be aware in the present, we must not pursue thoughts of how to be more aware. Such efforts only multiply thought and deepen distraction. Sensing this, we may then try not to think—but that too fails, because the act of trying not to think is itself an act of thinking.

Imagine being told not to think of a pink elephant. The more you try, the clearer it appears. To succeed, you must stop trying not to think of it at all. The same paradox governs awareness: when we try to stop thinking in order to be present, we only think about stopping. To remain aware, we need a different strategy.

Improvement, in any domain, comes from looking closely, not merely imagining how things could be better. A carpenter refines a cut by seeing the wood clearly. Likewise, to raise our baseline satisfaction, we must break free of thoughts and judgments about how experience should differ, and instead investigate what is actually happening. It takes awareness to notice the full gestalt of the present—most of which is habitually smothered by thought.

Promising Sensations

Like any skill, awareness develops gradually. No one becomes a great musician by beginning in the glare of the stage. First they practise alone, then with others, then before small audiences, and so on. Yet in many areas of life, we rarely step backstage to practise. As a result, we repeat unskilful habits of thought and behaviour that we’d like to outgrow.

By strengthening awareness, we cultivate the meta-skill from which all other skills emerge—one that can be applied to all parts of life. Yet staying aware amid life’s stimulation is hard. To practise effectively, we sometimes need to step away from the stage of daily life into a quieter setting where attention can be tuned with fewer distractions. Even then, with eyes closed and sounds turned down, thoughts continue to intrude. To deepen awareness, we must therefore learn how to slow our thoughts.

Visual, auditory, or tactile experiences are typically less agitating than thoughts, so we can sustain awareness by directing the mind toward sights, sounds, or sensations. Bodily sensations make especially good objects of focus because they are entirely non-conceptual. Although sensations are often accompanied by thoughts—try feeling your hand or hearing a car without a mental image—bare sensation itself cannot be captured in words.

Sensations have no size or shape; every description of them is just another thought. This can be confusing, but that’s the point: you cannot think your way to the experience of sensation. As an indescribable mixture of humming, vibrating, and buzzing, sensations free us from the conceptual realm we’re trying to leave behind.

By repeatedly directing attention to sensations, we strengthen the neural pathways that notice them, making such experiences more vivid in daily life. This enables us to shift attention away from thoughts even outside formal meditation. As awareness deepens, it can eventually be applied to thoughts themselves, so that instead of sweeping us along, they are recognised as the immaterial, impermanent phenomena they truly are.

A Catch-22

By now, readers may have noticed a contradiction at the heart of meditation. We wouldn’t meditate unless we hoped to bring about some improvement—but it’s this very wish for different conditions that fuels dissatisfaction in the first place. It does little good to understand that suffering arises from desire if that insight only gives rise to the desire not to desire. How can we pursue a practice aimed at change without reinforcing the urge for experience to differ? To escape this dilemma, we must adopt the right attitude towards what meditation entails.[5]

People often say that meditation is about accepting whatever arises, but that’s not quite right. With practice, acceptance deepens—but you cannot simply will yourself to be fine with what feels unpleasant. Trying to do so only breeds tension. Nor is meditation about feeling a certain way. Practice will naturally change how you feel, but hoping to feel a particular way only adds stress.[6] As long as we strive for better experience, the gap between our ideals and reality will produce suffering. It helps to know that meditation brings change for the better, but equally important is not to grasp at that change.

To escape this apparent catch-22, the best we can do is to remain aware of experience, however it feels. Even the feeling of not being okay with experience can be held in awareness.[7] When negative thoughts or emotions are observed rather than resisted, their grip begins to loosen. Over time, this simple shift in our relationship to discomfort weakens its power. Yet as we experience the benefits of greater awareness, we may begin to desire awareness itself. To avoid becoming neurotic about mindfulness—craving it and criticizing ourselves when it lapses—it helps to remember that awareness cannot be sustained through willpower alone.

Ultimately, whether awareness is present at any moment lies beyond our control. Even when we do everything right, it will still be interrupted. If awareness were truly under our command, we would have no need to study it, practise meditation, or adjust the external conditions that make it more likely to appear. We could simply snap our fingers and remain fully aware forever.

The limits of control became clear to a friend of mine during a retreat in Burma. After experiencing continuous awareness for some time, he decided to turn it off—only to find that he couldn’t. In that moment, he realised something important: if no sudden effort could dispel awareness, then no sudden effort could reliably sustain it. Awareness is either present or it isn’t, and we can only encourage its appearance through indirect means. We cannot simply will it into existence.

By imagining ourselves as autonomous agents in control of our minds—rather than as context-dependent processes with no central command—we waste energy trying to accumulate awareness. For example, when I believe there’s a little “me” inside my head directing meditation, I’m more likely to scold myself for drifting into thought—which only deepens the separation from experience. To avoid this counterproductive effort, it’s crucial to see that meditation neither requires nor implies an autonomous self.

There’s Still No Self

If anything seems to confirm the existence of a self, it’s meditation. Sitting down, closing one’s eyes, and paying attention to sights, sounds, thoughts, and sensations is about as deliberate as human action gets. Yet when we become truly aware of experience, the sense of control fades. Awareness awakens us from the mistaken notion that we are isolated selves, separate from the flow of causation. Arriving at this insight takes practice, but we can first understand—at least conceptually—why meditation does not imply a self.

Let’s consider how the intention to meditate arises. At first glance, it seems entirely within our control, yet closer inspection reveals its spontaneous, context-dependent nature. The impulse to practise depends largely on whether the benefits of meditation have been understood or felt. But we do not choose to understand or to feel such benefits—any more than we choose to understand that 1 + 1 = 2. Insight and experience occur on their own, and their effects ripple through life as the intention to practise.

External forces shape both how often we form the intention to meditate and whether we follow through on it. Among these forces is our level of discipline—a constraint that cannot simply be conjured at will (if you doubt this, try engineering a Steve Jobs–level of discipline to carry you through the rest of life). When we observe intention closely, we see that it arises without prior conscious input. It may be sparked by an environmental cue, a random chain of thoughts, or some untraceable whim of the mind, but it always reflects preceding causes and present conditions rather than conscious free will.

By mistaking the recognition of mental events for their conscious creation, we overlook the role of context in shaping experience. This grants us power we do not possess and burdens us with responsibility we do not need. Prior causes and present conditions—external circumstances and internal physiology alike—trigger our responses. On an existential level, there is no stepping outside ourselves to cue awareness, even during formal meditation.

To say that we can consciously return to awareness implies some degree of choice. But if that’s true, do we also choose when the choice to be aware will arise? And if so, why don’t we simply choose to make that choice constantly—saving ourselves the need to practise at all? As noted earlier, awareness and non-awareness unfold on their own, indifferent to our preferences. The best we can do is cultivate the knowledge, setting, and attitude that make awareness more likely.

Encouraging awareness is like recalling a forgotten thought. Our deliberate efforts to remember—say, an actor’s name—often fail. Yet some time after forming the intention to recall it, even after we’ve given up trying, the name suddenly returns. Remembering happens when conditions and intent align, not when we most want it. So it is with awareness. We can learn from our lapses and adjust conditions to make awareness more likely, but the lapses themselves are never our fault. After all, if awareness never faded, there would be no need to meditate.

Misplaced Enthusiasm

Many people avoid meditation because of the time and effort it seems to demand—or simply because they’ve never understood its purpose. That’s fine; we all neglect countless things that could enrich our lives. But others reject meditation for a different reason: they enjoy surrendering to their passions. For them, the emotional highs of fantasy more than compensate for the lows that follow when reality disappoints. They fear that adopting a calmer stance towards life would dull a familiar source of pleasure. This view is understandable—but misguided, for several reasons.

First, meditation does not extinguish life’s pleasures. Meaningful relationships and activities remain rewarding in themselves—and greater awareness deepens, rather than diminishes, that reward. As awareness grows, we also become more sensitive to the subtle obstacles that limit our enjoyment.

Second, meditation does not erase our passions and desires (unless you have exceptional karma), but awareness softens their grip. Passions remain, yet they lose their authority over the mind. To access more stable forms of satisfaction, we must be able to focus—and that’s impossible when we’re pulled about by constant craving, including the urge to check our phones. Indulging every desire rarely feels good. By cultivating a more neutral outlook, we can let minor cravings fall away with less struggle.

Third, the eudaimonic gains of meditation—the deeper, more stable forms of wellbeing—far outweigh the slight loss of excitement that comes from less fantasizing. Constant pleasure-seeking is no prerequisite for happiness, and hoping only for good experiences is a reliable path to disappointment. With fewer expectations, the world loses some power to disappoint us but gains more power to surprise us.

Exposure to the Present

The human drive to improve conditions has given us much—but it also plagues our existence. As we shape the world to satisfy our desires, those desires multiply while our comfort zones contract. Unless we turn our attention to the workings of the mind itself, we will remain unsatisfied, no matter how far technological or political progress takes us.

Obstacles to living in the present have long been recognised, as countless clichés attest: we’re always chasing the next best thing, wanting what we can’t have, convinced the grass is greener elsewhere. Yet until recently, Western culture has offered no reliable method for inhabiting the present (we had a habit of burning those who tried to teach us).

Meditation can be seen as exposure therapy to the present moment. By stripping the moment of its usual pleasures and acclimatising, we weaken the habit of constant seeking. As we seek less, more of experience seeps into awareness. Though we can search for satisfaction to our heart’s endless discontent, true contentment begins when the search itself is dropped. If we understand the value of awareness, recognise the limits of thought, and commit—even lightly—to practice, the present moment will find us. That is as much as we can do.

[1] This insight was revealed by the Buddha as the First Noble Truth, commonly translated as “life is suffering”. Upon hearing this, some people disregard Buddhism as a nihilistic religion. But a more palatable translation could be, “Life involves ubiquitous dissatisfaction and anxiety.”

[2] This is part of the Buddha’s Third and Fourth Noble Truths—i.e., liberation from suffering is possible, if one knows how to go about it.

[3] This is not to say that people should avoid guided meditations. Good guided meditations (e.g., those by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Joseph Goldstein, Tara Brach, Jayasāra) are invaluable when learning to meditate. And Stephen Procter and Ajahn Achalo have hours of meditations for all skill levels on the app Insight Timer.

[4] This is the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth—i.e., suffering flows from desire.

[5] The Buddha covers this in the Noble Eightfold Path.

[6] This is not to say that fantastic states of mind are not attainable through meditation—they are, but you will impede them by ardently striving towards them.

[7] If any readers are curious what this feels like, it’s just having the background recognition that you’re not okay with how things are. It’s not a complex concept but is difficult to maintain because we constantly get swept away by the urge for things to be better. Or as another example, imagine suddenly understanding that you’re confused about something—you’ll be just as confused as before, but because you’re aware of it, it’s less of a problem.