Meditation isn’t about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling how you feel.

This quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn gets at the fundamental misunderstanding of meditation that leads to people giving up on it. In the last few years we have honed our understanding of meditation as a mundane method of self-improvement. Unfortunately, we still suffer from expectations that meditation is a supernatural method of achieving transcendent moments of insight.

Sometimes in meditation we may experience a moment of heightened awareness or a special sensitivity to a sensation in our body and think, “that was it, I got it for a second!” If we think we’re only attaining the benefits of meditation when these infrequent moments of heightened experience occur, then we’ll think we’re not doing it right the rest of the time. Those moments, however, are just a distraction — a side effect. One could hypothetically meditate for years and never have one of those experiences, and would still benefit immensely.

One of the most common reasons I hear from people for not meditating goes something like, “My brain is too scattered, I can’t do it!” Newsflash: you’re not that special. Thoughts like this crossed my mind when I first started. This is a near-universal sentiment. It’s also exactly what meditation helps resolve. To re-use a previous analogy, this is as ridiculous as saying, “I’m too sleep-deprived for sleep to do me any good!”

The reason that people quit meditating over this is that they have false expectations of what meditation is supposed to be like. They think that in order to benefit from meditation, they have to achieve these heightened experiences. They’re correct that their brain is too scattered, if their idea of success is framed around these heightened experiences. If we associate these moments with meditating “correctly,” then a scattered meditation session is a failure, and then when we fail repeatedly, we give up.

Sometimes even someone who has been meditating for decades will sit down and get stuck in thoughts they can’t quiet down for 20 or 30 minutes. That isn’t a failure. That meditation session is still a valuable step along the way and contributes to all the benefits we know meditation can provide. Part of the point of meditating is to observe what condition the mind is in, including if it’s in a state of chaos. Sometimes an individual meditation session will exacerbate stress rather than alleviate it, but that still strengthens the mind in the long term.