Take a moment. Breathe. Focus your mind. Slow down and read each word. Become aware of yourself reading this sentence, this paragraph. You, sitting there, focusing on each word, one by one. Become aware of each sound as it echoes in your mind, the one you’re hearing right now, and this one, and again and again and again. The voice in your mind reading this to you, is that you? If so, then who is doing the listening?
Ideally, the above paragraph forced you into some form of meditation. It forced you to become aware of your thoughts and mental processes, and then hopefully helped you differentiate your Self from the thoughts and sounds running through your head.
What Is Meditation?
Meditation forces one to disidentify with their mind and emotions. It is perhaps the easiest to learn and most readily available personal developmental tool on the planet. The disabled can do it. Children can do it. Stephen Hawking can do it. Anyone with conscious awareness can practice it.
You can do it on a crowded bus. You can do it in a monastery. You can do it in your bedroom. You can do it now as you read this. Experienced meditators can even do it while they sleep.
The benefits of meditation — mental, emotional, and physical — are innumerable and there are no side effects to a small daily practice.¹ You can learn to do it in as little as five minutes and once you learn you’ll never forget. Doing it as little 10 minutes a day can make you happier and healthier, and doing it as little as 30 minutes per day could change your life.
Yet almost no one does it regularly. Myself included. Why?
It’s hard to do. Really fucking hard. No seriously, take a few seconds and close your eyes and try to think about nothing for 30 seconds. No seriously, try it. Just for 30 seconds. I guarantee you can’t do it.
If you try, you’ll soon notice that our minds are producing a constant stream of thought vomit, and most of us identify so strongly with it that we don’t even notice. Our mental energy is sapped by an endless stream of useless, unhelpful thoughts and opinions:
“I hope the Lakers win tonight. I wonder if Shannon will ever call me back. I really enjoyed our date together, but maybe I…
